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.