positive engagement. I had chosen besides a very easy style. Compare it
with the almost contemporary 'Merry Men'; one reader may prefer the one
style, one the other--'tis an affair of character, perhaps of mood; but
no expert can fail to see that the one is much more difficult, and the
other much easier to maintain. It seems as though a full-grown
experienced man of letters might engage to turn out 'Treasure Island' at
so many pages a day, and keep his pipe alight. But alas! this was not my
case. Fifteen days I stuck to it, and turned out fifteen chapters; and
then, in the early paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold.
My mouth was empty; there was not one word of 'Treasure Island' in my
bosom; and here were the proofs of the beginning already waiting me at
the 'Hand and Spear'! Then I corrected them, living for the most part
alone, walking on the heath at Weybridge in dewy autumn mornings, a good
deal pleased with what I had done, and more appalled than I can depict
to you in words at what remained for me to do. I was thirty one; I was
the head of a family; I had lost my health; I had never yet paid my way,
never yet made 200_l._ a year; my father had quite recently bought back
and cancelled a book that was judged a failure: was this to be another
and last fiasco? I was indeed very close on despair; but I shut my mouth
hard, and during the journey to Davos, where I was to pass the winter,
had the resolution to think of other things and bury myself in the
novels of M. de Boisgobey. Arrived at my destination, down I sat one
morning to the unfinished tale; and behold! it flowed from me like
small talk; and in a second tide of delighted industry, and again at a
rate of a chapter a day, I finished 'Treasure Island.' It had to be
transcribed almost exactly; my wife was ill; the schoolboy remained
alone of the faithful; and John Addington Symonds (to whom I timidly
mentioned what I was engaged on) looked on me askance. He was at that
time very eager I should write on the characters of Theophrastus: so
far out may be the judgments of the wisest men. But Symonds (to be sure)
was scarce the confidant to go to for sympathy on a boy's story. He was
large-minded; 'a full man,' if there was one; but the very name of my
enterprise would suggest to him only capitulations of sincerity and
solecisms of style. Well! he was not far wrong.
[Illustration: MRS. R. L. STEVENSON]
'Treasure Island'--it was Mr. Henderson who deleted the first title,
'The Sea Cook'--appeared duly in the story paper, where it figured in
the ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and attracted not the least
attention. I did not care. I liked the tale myself, for much the same
reason as my father liked the beginning: it was my kind of picturesque.
I was not a little proud of John Silver, also; and to this day rather
admire that smooth and formidable adventurer. What was infinitely more
exhilarating, I had passed a landmark; I had finished a tale, and
written 'The End' upon my manuscript, as I had not done since 'The
Pentland Rising,' when I was a boy of sixteen not yet at college. In
truth it was so by a set of lucky accidents: had not Dr. Japp come on
his visit, had not the tale flowed from me with singular ease, it must
have been laid aside like its predecessors, and found a circuitous and
unlamented way to the fire. Purists may suggest it would have been
better so. I am not of that mind. The tale seems to have given much
pleasure, and it brought (or was the means of bringing) fire and food
and wine to a deserving family in which I took an interest. I need
scarcely say I mean my own.
[Illustration: STEVENSON TELLING 'YARNS']
But the adventures of 'Treasure Island' are not yet quite at an end. I
had written it up to the map. The map was the chief part of my plot. For
instance, I had called an islet 'Skeleton Island,' not knowing what I
meant, seeking only for the immediate picturesque, and it was to justify
this name that I broke into the gallery of Mr. Poe and stole Flint's
pointer. And in the same way, it was because I had made two harbours
that the 'Hispaniola' was sent on her wanderings with Israel Hands. The
time came when it was decided to republish, and I sent in my manuscript,
and the map along with it, to Messrs. Cassell. The proofs came, they
were corrected, but I heard nothing of the map. I wrote and asked; was
told it had never been received, and sat aghast. It is one thing to draw
a map at random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write
up a story to the measurements. It is quite another to have to examine a
whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions contained in it, and
with a pair of compasses, painfully design a map to suit the data. I did
it; and the map was drawn again in my father's office, with
embellishments of blowing whales and sailing ships, and my father
himself brought into service a knack he had of various writing, and
elaborately _forged_ the signature of Captain Flint, and the sailing
directions of Billy Bones. But somehow it was never 'Treasure Island' to
me.
I have said the map was the most of the plot. I might almost say it was
the whole. A few reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, and Washington Irving, a
copy of Johnson's 'Buccaneers,' the name of the Dead Man's Chest from
Kingsley's 'At Last,' some recollections of canoeing on the high seas,
and the map itself, with its infinite, eloquent suggestion, made up the
whole of my materials. It is, perhaps, not often that a map figures so
largely in a tale, yet it is always important. The author must know his
countryside, whether real or imaginary, like his hand; the distances,
the points of the compass, the place of the sun's rising, the behaviour
of the moon, should all be beyond cavil. And how troublesome the moon
is! I have come to grief over the moon in 'Prince Otto,' and so soon as
that was pointed out to me, adopted a precaution which I recommend to
other men--I never write now without an almanack. With an almanack, and
the map of the country, and the plan of every house, either actually
plotted on paper or already and immediately apprehended in the mind, a
man may hope to avoid some of the grossest possible blunders. With the
map before him, he will scarce allow the sun to set in the east, as it
does in 'The Antiquary.' With the almanack at hand, he will scarce allow
two horsemen, journeying on the most urgent affair, to employ six days,
from three of the Monday morning till late in the Saturday night, upon a
journey of, say, ninety or a hundred miles, and before the week is out,
and still on the same nags, to cover fifty in one day, as may be read at
length in the inimitable novel of 'Rob Roy.' And it is certainly well,
though far from necessary, to avoid such 'croppers.' But it is my
contention--my superstition, if you like--that who is faithful to his
map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration, daily and
hourly, gains positive support, and not mere negative immunity from
accident. The tale has a root there; it grows in that soil; it has a
spine of its own behind the words. Better if the country be real, and he
has walked every foot of it and knows every milestone. But even with
imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as
he studies it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he
will discover obvious, though unsuspected, shortcuts and footprints for
his messengers; and even when a map is not all the plot, as it was in
'Treasure Island,' it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.
THE END
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[A] In this ship, the 'Hougoumont,' I served three years. She was a
transport, and was in the China war, 1860-1. Her burden was about 1,000
tons. This picture represents her as a sheer hulk employed in the
construction of the Forth Bridge. I saw her towing down Channel in this
state in 1889--she drew abreast of my house at Deal--and I could have
wept to witness my old floating home in so miserable a condition.--C. R.
[B] This and succeeding illustrations are from photographs by Fradelle
and Young.
[C] This and the succeeding illustrations are from photographs by
Fradelle & Young.
[D] This and the succeeding illustrations are from photographs by
'Adrian.'
[E] Most of the illustrations in this chapter are from photographs by
Messrs. W. Heath & Co., Plymouth.
[F] See the writer's _Life of David Gray_.
[G] I have given a detailed account of Peacock in my _Look Round
Literature_.
[H] O those 'Tendencies of one's Time'! O those dismal Phantoms,
conjured up by the blatant Book-taster and the indolent Reviewer! How
many a poor Soul, that would fain have been honest, have they bewildered
into the Slough of Despond and the Bog of Beautiful Ideas!--R. B.
[I] _Ne pas confondre._ Not the slim green pamphlet with the imprint of
Andrew Elliott, for which (as I see with amazement from the book-lists)
the gentlemen of England are willing to pay fancy prices; but its
predecessor, a bulky historical romance without a spark of merit, and
now deleted from the world.