In those dim recesses of the consciousness where things have their
beginning, if ever things have a beginning, I suppose the origin of this
novel may be traced to a fact of a fortnight's sojourn on the western
shore of lake Champlain in the summer of 1891. Across the water in the
State of Vermont I had constantly before my eyes a majestic mountain form
which the earlier French pioneers had named "Le Lion Couchant," but which
their plainer-minded Yankee successors preferred to call "The Camel's
Hump." It really looked like a sleeping lion; the head was especially
definite; and when, in the course of some ten years, I found the scheme
for a story about a summer hotel which I had long meant to write, this
image suggested the name of 'The Landlord at Lion's Head.' I gave the
title to my unwritten novel at once and never wished to change it, but
rejoiced in the certainty that, whatever the novel turned out to be, the
title could not be better.
I began to write the story four years later, when we were settled for the
winter in our flat on Central Park, and as I was a year in doing it, with
other things, I must have taken the unfinished manuscript to and from
Magnolia, Massachusetts, and Long Beach, Long Island, where I spent the
following summer. It was first serialized in Harper's Weekly and in the
London Illustrated News, as well as in an Australian newspaper--I forget
which one; and it was published as a completed book in 1896.
I remember concerning it a very becoming despair when, at a certain
moment in it, I began to wonder what I was driving at. I have always had
such moments in my work, and if I cannot fitly boast of them, I can at
least own to them in freedom from the pride that goes before a fall. My
only resource at such times was to keep working; keep beating harder and
harder at the wall which seemed to close me in, till at last I broke
through into the daylight beyond. In this case, I had really such a very
good grip of my characters that I need not have had the usual fear of
their failure to work out their destiny. But even when the thing was done
and I carried the completed manuscript to my dear old friend, the late
Henry Loomis Nelson, then editor of the Weekly, it was in more fear of
his judgment than I cared to show. As often happened with my manuscript
in such exigencies, it seemed to go all to a handful of shrivelled
leaves. When we met again and he accepted it for the Weekly, with a
handclasp of hearty welcome, I could scarcely gasp out my unfeigned
relief. We had talked the scheme of it over together; he had liked the
notion, and he easily made me believe, after my first dismay, that he
liked the result even better.
I myself liked the hero of the tale more than I have liked worthier men,
perhaps because I thought I had achieved in him a true rustic New England
type in contact with urban life under entirely modern conditions. What
seemed to me my esthetic success in him possibly softened me to his
ethical shortcomings; but I do not expect others to share my weakness for
Jeff Durgin, whose strong, rough surname had been waiting for his
personality ever since I had got it off the side of an ice-cart many
years before.
At the time the story was imagined Harvard had been for four years much
in the direct knowledge of the author, and I pleased myself in realizing
the hero's experience there from even more intimacy with the university
moods and manners than had supported me in the studies of an earlier
fiction dealing with them. I had not lived twelve years in Cambridge
without acquaintance such as even an elder man must make with the
undergraduate life; but it is only from its own level that this can be
truly learned, and I have always been ready to stand corrected by
undergraduate experience. Still, I have my belief that as a jay--the word
may now be obsolete--Jeff Durgin is not altogether out of drawing; though
this is, of course, the phase of his character which is one of the least
important. What I most prize in him, if I may go to the bottom of the
inkhorn, is the realization of that anti-Puritan quality which was always
vexing the heart of Puritanism, and which I had constantly felt one of
the most interesting facts in my observation of New England.
As for the sort of summer hotel portrayed in these pages, it was
materialized from an acquaintance with summer hotels extending over
quarter of a century, and scarcely to be surpassed if paralleled. I had a
passion for knowing about them and understanding their operation which I
indulged at every opportunity, and which I remember was satisfied as to
every reasonable detail at one of the pleasantest seaside hostelries by
one of the most intelligent and obliging of landlords. Yet, hotels for
hotels, I was interested in those of the hills rather than those of the
shores.
I worked steadily if not rapidly at the story. Often I went back over it,
and tore it to pieces and put it together again. It made me feel at times
as if I should never learn my trade, but so did every novel I have
written; every novel, in fact, has been a new trade. In, the case of this
one the publishers were hurrying me in the revision for copy to give the
illustrator, who was hurrying his pictures for the English and Australian
serializations.
KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909.