or Books, progressed. Meantime, I was breaking out into poetry in the
magazines, and writing 'criticism' by the yard. At last the time came
when I remembered another friend with whom I had corresponded, and whose
advice I thought I might now ask with some confidence. This was George
Henry Lewes, to whom, when I was a boy in Glasgow, I had sent a bundle
of manuscript, with the blunt question, 'Am I, or am I not, a Poet?' To
my delight he had replied to me with a qualified affirmative, saying
that in the productions he had 'discerned a real faculty, and _perhaps_
a future poet. I say perhaps,' he added, 'because I do not know your
age, and because there are so many poetical blossoms which never come to
fruit.' He had, furthermore, advised me 'to write as much as I felt
impelled to write, but to publish nothing'--at any rate, for a couple of
years. Three years had passed, and I had neither published
anything--that is to say, in book form--nor had I had any further
communication with my kind correspondent. To Lewes, then, I wrote,
reminding him of our correspondence, telling him that I _had_ waited,
not two years, but three, and that I now felt inclined to face the
public. I soon received an answer, the result of which was that I went,
on Lewes's invitation, to the Priory, North Bank, Regent's Park, and met
my friend and his partner, better known as 'George Eliot.'
But, as the novelists say, I am anticipating. Sick to death, David Gray
had returned to the cottage of his father, the handloom weaver, at
Kirkintilloch, and there had peacefully passed away, leaving as his
legacy to the world the volume of beautiful poems published under the
auspices of Lord Houghton. I knew of his death the hour he died; awaking
in the night, I was certain of my loss, and spoke of it (long before the
formal news reached me) to a friend. This by the way; but what is more
to the purpose is that my first grief for a beloved comrade had
expressed itself in the words which were to form the 'proem' of my first
book--
Poet gentle hearted,
Are you then departed,
And have you ceased to dream the dream we loved of old so well?
Has the deeply-cherish'd
Aspiration perished,
And are you happy, David, in that heaven where you dwell?
Have you found the secret
We, so wildly, sought for,
And is your soul enswath'd at last in the singing robes you fought for?
Full of my dead friend, I spoke of him to Lewes and George Eliot,
telling them the piteous story of his life and death. Both were deeply
touched, and Lewes cried, 'Tell that story to the public'; which I did,
immediately afterwards, in the _Cornhill Magazine_. By this time I had
my Twins ready, and had discovered a publisher for one of them,
_Undertones_. The other, _Idyls and Legends of Inverburn_, was a
ruggeder bantling, containing almost the first _blank verse_ poems ever
written in Scottish dialect. I selected one of the poems, 'Willie
Baird,' and showed it to Lewes. He expressed himself delighted, and
asked for more. I then showed him the 'Two Babes.' 'Better and better!'
he wrote; 'publish a volume of such poems and your position is assured.'
More than this, he at once found me a publisher, Mr. George Smith, of
Messrs. Smith and Elder, who offered me a good round sum (such it seemed
to me then) for the copyright. Eventually, however, after 'Willie Baird'
had been published in the _Cornhill_, I withdrew the manuscript from
Messrs. Smith and Elder, and transferred it to Mr. Alexander Strahan,
who offered me both more liberal terms and more enthusiastic
appreciation.
[Illustration: THE STUDY]
It was just after the appearance of my story of David Gray in the
_Cornhill_ that I first met, at the Priory, North Bank, with Robert
Browning. It was an odd and representative gathering of men, only one
lady being present, the hostess, George Eliot. I was never much of a
hero-worshipper, but I had long been a sympathetic Browningite, and I
well remember George Eliot taking me aside after my first _tête-à-tête_
with the poet, and saying, 'Well, what do you think of him? Does he come
up to your ideal?' He _didn't_ quite, I must confess, but I afterwards
learned to know him well and to understand him better. He was delighted
with my statement that one of Gray's wild ideas was to rush over to
Florence and 'throw himself on the sympathy of Robert Browning.'
Phantoms of these first books of mine, how they begin to rise around me!
Faces of friends and counsellors that have flown for ever; the sibylline
Marian Evans with her long, weird, dreamy face; Lewes, with his big brow
and keen thoughtful eyes; Browning, pale and spruce, his eye like a
skipper's cocked-up at the weather; Peacock, with his round, mellifluous
speech of the old Greeks; David Gray, great-eyed and beautiful, like
Shelley's ghost; Lord Houghton, with his warm worldly smile and
easy-fitting enthusiasm. Where are they all now? Where are the roses of
last summer, the snows of yester year? I passed by the Priory to-day,
and it looked like a great lonely Tomb. In those days, the house where I
live now was not built; all up here Hampstead-ways was grass and fields.
It was over these fields that Herbert Spencer and George Eliot used to
walk on their way to Hampstead Heath. The Sibyl has gone, but the great
Philosopher still remains, to brighten the sunshine. It was not my luck
to know him _then_--would it had been!--but he is my friend and
neighbour in these latter days, and, thanks to him, I still get glimpses
of the manners of the old gods.
With the publication of my first two books, I was fairly launched, I may
say, on the stormy waters of literature. When the _Athenæum_ told its
readers that 'this was _poetry_, and of a noble kind,' and when Lewes
vowed in the _Fortnightly Review_ that even if I 'never wrote another
line, my place among the pastoral poets would be undisputed,' I suppose
I felt happy enough--far more happy than any praise could make me now.
Poor little pigmy in a cockle-boat, I thought Creation was ringing with
my name! I think I must have seemed rather conceited and 'bounceable,'
for I have a vivid remembrance of a _Fortnightly_ dinner at the Star and
Garter, Richmond, when Anthony Trollope, angry with me for expressing a
doubt about the poetical greatness of Horace, wanted to fling a decanter
at my head! It was about this time that an omniscient publisher, after
an interview with me, exclaimed (the circumstance is historical), 'I
don't like that young man; he talked to me as if he was God Almighty, or
_Lord Byron_!' But in sober truth, I never had the sort of conceit with
which men credited me; I merely lacked gullibility, and saw, at the
first glance, the whole unmistakable humbug and insincerity of the
Literary Life. I think still that, as a rule, the profession of letters
narrows the sympathy and warps the intelligence. When I saw the
importance which a great man or woman could attach to a piece of
perfunctory criticism, when I saw the care with which this Eminent
Person 'humoured his reputation,' and the anxiety with which that
Eminent Person concealed his true character, I found my young illusions
very rapidly fading. On one occasion, when George Eliot was very much
pestered by an unknown lady, an insignificant individual, who had thrust
herself somewhat pertinaciously upon her, she turned to me and asked,
with a smile, for my opinion. I gave it, rudely enough, to the effect
that it was good for 'distinguished people' to be reminded occasionally
of how very small consequence they really were, in the mighty life of
the World!
From that time until the present I have pursued the vocation into which
fatal Fortune, during boyhood, incontinently thrust me, and have
subsisted, ill sometimes, well sometimes, by a busy pen. I may,
therefore, with a certain experience, if with little authority, imitate
those who have preceded me in giving reminiscences of their first
literary beginnings, and offer a few words of advice to my younger
brethren--to those persons, I mean, who are entering the profession of
Literature. To begin with, I entirely agree with Mr. Grant Allen in his
recent avowal that Literature is the poorest and least satisfactory of
all professions; I will go even further, and affirm that it is one of
the least ennobling. With a fairly extensive knowledge of the writers of
my own period, I can honestly say that I have scarcely met one
individual who has not deteriorated morally by the pursuit of literary
Fame. For complete literary success among contemporaries, it is
imperative that a man should either have no real opinions, or be able to
conceal such as he possesses, that he should have one eye on the market
and the other on the public journals, that he should humbug himself into
the delusion that book-writing is the highest work in the Universe, and
that he should regulate his likes and dislikes by one law, that of
expediency. If his nature is in arms against anything that is rotten in
Society or in Literature itself, he must be silent. Above all, he must
lay this solemn truth to heart, that when the World speaks well of him
the World will demand the _price_ of praise, and that price will
possibly be his living Soul. He may tinker, he may trim, he may succeed,
he may be buried in Westminster Abbey, he may hear before he dies all
the people saying, 'How good and great he is! how perfect is his art!
how gloriously he embodies the Tendencies of his Time!'[H] but he will
know all the same that the price has been paid, and that his living Soul
has gone, to furnish that whitewashed Sepulchre, a Blameless Reputation.
[Illustration: MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN AND HIS FAVOURITE DOG]
For one other thing, also, the Neophyte in Literature had better be
prepared. He will never be able to subsist by creative writing unless it
so happens that the form of expression he chooses is popular in form
(fiction, for example), and even in that case, the work he does, if he
is to live by it, must be in harmony with the social and artistic
_status quo_. Revolt of any kind is always disagreeable. Three-fourths
of the success of Lord Tennyson (to take an example) was due to the
fact that this fine poet regarded Life and all its phenomena from the
standpoint of the English public school, that he ethically and
artistically embodied the sentiments of our excellent middle-class
education. His great American contemporary, Whitman, in some respects
the most commanding spirit of this generation, gained only a few
disciples, and was entirely misunderstood and neglected by contemporary
criticism. Another prosperous writer, to whom I have already alluded,
George Eliot, enjoyed enormous popularity in her lifetime, while the
most strenuous and passionate novelist of her period, Charles Reade, was
entirely distanced by her in the immediate race for Fame. In Literature,
as in all things, manners and costume are most important; the hall-mark
of contemporary success is perfect Respectability. It is not respectable
to be too candid on any subject, religious, moral, or political. It is
very respectable to say, or imply, that this country is the best of all
possible countries, that War is a noble institution, that the Protestant
Religion is grandly liberal, and that social evils are only diversified
forms of social good. Above all, to be respectable, one must have
'beautiful ideas.' 'Beautiful ideas' are the very best stock-in-trade a
young writer can begin with. They are indispensable to every complete
literary outfit. Without them, the short cut to Parnassus will never be
discovered, even though one starts from Rugby.
'_TREASURE ISLAND_'
BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
It was far indeed from being my first book, for I am not a novelist
alone. But I am well aware that my paymaster, the Great Public, regards
what else I have written with indifference, if not aversion; if it call
upon me at all, it calls on me in the familiar and indelible character;
and when I am asked to talk of my first book, no question in the world
but what is meant is my first novel.
Sooner or later, somehow, anyhow, I was bound to write a novel. It seems
vain to ask why. Men are born with various manias: from my earliest
childhood, it was mine to make a plaything of imaginary series of
events; and as soon as I was able to write, I became a good friend to
the paper-makers. Reams upon reams must have gone to the making of
'Rathillet,' 'The Pentland Rising,'[I] 'The King's Pardon' (otherwise
'Park Whitehead'), 'Edward Daven,' 'A Country Dance,' and 'A Vendetta in
the West'; and it is consolatory to remember that these reams are now
all ashes, and have been received again into the soil. I have named but
a few of my ill-fated efforts, only such indeed as came to a fair bulk
ere they were desisted from; and even so they cover a long vista of
years. 'Rathillet' was attempted before fifteen, 'The Vendetta' at
twenty-nine, and the succession of defeats lasted unbroken till I was
thirty-one. By that time, I had written little books and little essays
and short stories; and had got patted on the back and paid for
them--though not enough to live upon. I had quite a reputation, I was
the successful man; I passed my days in toil, the futility of which
would sometimes make my cheek to burn--that I should spend a man's
energy upon this business, and yet could not earn a livelihood: and
still there shone ahead of me an unattained ideal: although I had
attempted the thing with vigour not less than ten or twelve times, I had
not yet written a novel. All--all my pretty ones--had gone for a little,
and then stopped inexorably like a schoolboy's watch. I might be
compared to a cricketer of many years' standing who should never have
made a run. Anybody can write a short story--a bad one, I mean--who has
industry and paper and time enough; but not everyone may hope to write
even a bad novel. It is the length that kills. The accepted novelist
may take his novel up and put it down, spend days upon it in vain,
and write not any more than he makes haste to blot. Not so the
beginner. Human nature has certain rights; instinct--the instinct of
self-preservation--forbids that any man (cheered and supported by the
consciousness of no previous victory) should endure the miseries of
unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be measured in weeks.
There must be something for hope to feed upon. The beginner must have a
slant of wind, a lucky vein must be running, he must be in one of those
hours when the words come and the phrases balance of themselves--_even
to begin_. And having begun, what a dread looking forward is that until
the book shall be accomplished! For so long a time, the slant is to
continue unchanged, the vein to keep running, for so long a time you
must keep at command the same quality of style: for so long a time your
puppets are to be always vital, always consistent, always vigorous! I
remember I used to look, in those days, upon every three-volume novel
with a sort of veneration, as a feat--not possibly of literature--but
at least of physical and moral endurance and the courage of Ajax.
[Illustration: drawing by A. S. Boyd
signed: Sincerely yours,
Robert Louis Stevenson]
[Illustration: MR. STEVENSON'S HOUSE IN SAMOA]
In the fated year I came to live with my father and mother at Kinnaird,
above Pitlochry. Then I walked on the red moors and by the side of the
golden burn; the rude, pure air of our mountains inspirited, if it did
not inspire us, and my wife and I projected a joint volume of logic
stories, for which she wrote 'The Shadow on the Bed,' and I turned out
'Thrawn Janet' and a first draft of 'The Merry Men.' I love my native
air, but it does not love me; and the end of this delightful period was
a cold, a fly-blister, and a migration by Strathairdle and Glenshee to
the Castleton of Braemar. There it blew a good deal and rained in a
proportion; my native air was more unkind than man's ingratitude, and I
must consent to pass a good deal of my time between four walls in a
house lugubriously known as the Late Miss McGregor's Cottage. And now
admire the finger of predestination. There was a schoolboy in the Late
Miss McGregor's Cottage, home from the holidays, and much in want of
'something craggy to break his mind upon.' He had no thought of
literature; it was the art of Raphael that received his fleeting
suffrages; and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box of water
colours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picture gallery. My
more immediate duty towards the gallery was to be showman; but I would
sometimes unbend a little, join the artist (so to speak) at the easel,
and pass the afternoon with him in a generous emulation, making coloured
drawings. On one of these occasions, I made the map of an island; it was
elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took
my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like
sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my
performance 'Treasure Island.' I am told there are people who do not
care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the
woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric
footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the
mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the _Standing
Stone_ or the _Druidic Circle_ on the heath; here is an inexhaustible
fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence worth of
imagination to understand with! No child but must remember laying his
head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it
grow populous with fairy armies. Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon
my map of 'Treasure Island,' the future character of the book began to
appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and
bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they
passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square
inches of a flat projection. The next thing I knew I had some papers
before me and was writing out a list of chapters. How often have I done
so, and the thing gone no further! But there seemed elements of success
about this enterprise. It was to be a story for boys; no need of
psychology or fine writing; and I had a boy at hand to be a touchstone.
Women were excluded. I was unable to handle a brig (which the
_Hispaniola_ should have been), but I thought I could make shift to sail
her as a schooner without public shame. And then I had an idea for John
Silver from which I promised myself funds of entertainment; to take an
admired friend of mine (whom the reader very likely knows and admires as
much as I do), to deprive him of all his finer qualities and higher
graces of temperament, to leave him with nothing but his strength, his
courage, his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, and to try to
express these in terms of the culture of a raw tarpaulin. Such psychical
surgery is, I think, a common way of 'making character'; perhaps it is,
indeed, the only way. We can put in the quaint figure that spoke a
hundred words with us yesterday by the wayside; but do we know him? Our
friend with his infinite variety and flexibility, we know--but can we
put him in? Upon the first, we must engraft secondary and imaginary
qualities, possibly all wrong; from the second, knife in hand, we must
cut away and deduct the needless arborescence of his nature, but the
trunk and the few branches that remain we may at least be fairly sure
of.
On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire, and the rain
drumming on the window, I began 'The Sea Cook,' for that was the
original title. I have begun (and finished) a number of other books, but
I cannot remember to have sat down to one of them with more complacency.
It is not to be wondered at, for stolen waters are proverbially sweet. I
am now upon a painful chapter. No doubt the parrot once belonged to
Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe. I think
little of these, they are trifles and details; and no man can hope to
have a monopoly of skeletons or make a corner in talking birds. The
stockade I am told, is from 'Masterman Ready.' It may be, I care not a
jot. These useful writers had fulfilled the poet's saying: departing,
they had left behind them Footprints on the sands of time, Footprints
which perhaps another--and I was the other! It is my debt to Washington
Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I believe
plagiarism was rarely carried farther. I chanced to pick up the 'Tales
of a Traveller' some years ago with a view to an anthology of prose
narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones, his chest,
the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit, and a good deal of
the material detail of my first chapters--all were there, all were the
property of Washington Irving. But I had no guess of it then as I sat
writing by the fireside, in what seemed the spring-tides of a somewhat
pedestrian inspiration; nor yet day by day, after lunch, as I read aloud
my morning's work to the family. It seemed to me original as sin; it
seemed to belong to me like my right eye. I had counted on one boy, I
found I had two in my audience. My father caught fire at once with all
the romance and childishness of his original nature. His own stories,
that every night of his life he put himself to sleep with, dealt
perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, old sailors, and
commercial travellers before the era of steam. He never finished one of
these romances; the lucky man did not require to! But in 'Treasure
Island' he recognised something kindred to his own imagination; it was
_his_ kind of picturesque; and he not only heard with delight the daily
chapter, but set himself acting to collaborate. When the time came for
Billy Bones's chest to be ransacked, he must have passed the better part
of a day preparing, on the back of a legal envelope, an inventory of its
contents, which I exactly followed; and the name of 'Flint's old
ship'--the 'Walrus'--was given at his particular request. And now who
should come dropping in, _ex machinâ_, but Dr. Japp, like the disguised
prince who is to bring down the curtain upon peace and happiness in the
last act; for he carried in his pocket, not a horn or a talisman, but a
publisher--had, in fact, been charged by my old friend, Mr. Henderson,
to unearth new writers for _Young Folks_. Even the ruthlessness of a
united family recoiled before the extreme measure of inflicting on our
guest the mutilated members of 'The Sea Cook'; at the same time, we
would by no means stop our readings; and accordingly the tale was begun
again at the beginning, and solemnly re-delivered for the benefit of Dr.
Japp. From that moment on, I have thought highly of his critical
faculty; for when he left us, he carried away the manuscript in his
portmanteau.