Introduction

In the year 1895 I was at length certain, or almost certain, that I was a man of letters. I had been, if I may put the matter thus familiarly, for more than twelve years “on the job.” In ’83 I had written a little book called The Anatomy of Tobacco, chiefly as a counter-irritant to loneliness and semi-starvation. In ’84 I had translated the Heptaméron of Margaret of Navarre, while ’85 and ’86 were devoted to the concoction of The Chronicle of Clemendy a volume of medieval tales. Another translation, a version of Le Moyen de Parvenir by Beroalde de Ferville⁠—his name is more beautiful than his book⁠—occupied the leisure of my evenings somewhere about ’88 and ’89, the days being given to the rendering of the Memoirs of Casnova (twelve volumes) into the English tongue.

In 1890 I was writing essays and short stories and odds and ends and varieties for papers which have now become ghosts: The Globe, The St. James’s Gazette, and The Whirlwind; to say nothing of “smart” tales contributed to an extinct, or almost extinct, family of journals; the “society” papers. In ’90 and ’91 I wrote the “Great God Pan” which was published at the end of ’94 and made a mild sort of sensation with old ladies, on the press and off it. And in the spring and summer of ’94 I was busy with The Three Impostors which fell somewhat flatly when it was issued in the autumn of ’95. So, as I say, I began to feel almost convinced towards the end of the year 1895 that I was in some degree a literary man, that my business lay in the direction of writing books. Consequently, it appeared that I had better go and write one. Very good: the next question was⁠—what sort of a book should I write?

And here, the reception that had been given to The Three Impostors helped me greatly. I have said that it was of the flat kind, but beyond this, it was critical. I was told that I was merely a second-rate imitator of Stevenson. This was not quite all the truth, but there was a great deal of truth in it, and I am glad to say that I took my correction in a proper spirit. I resolved to try to amend my ways. I made manly resolutions. As I put it to my old friend, that distinguished American citizen, A. E. Waite: “I will never give anybody a white powder again.” And on the whole, I have honoured that vow ever since. I was to start afresh, then, from the beginning, to turn over a new leaf, both as regards matter and manner. No more white powders, no more of the calix principis inferorum, no more hanky-panky with the Great God Pan, or the Little People or any people of that dubious sort; and⁠—this was the hard part of it⁠—no more of the measured, rounded Stevensonian cadence, which I had learned to use with some faculty and more facility. And so we were getting on; I had at least found out the sort of book that I was not going to write. It merely remained to discover what sort of book I was going to write.

I took this problem out with me on solemn walks in dimmest Bloomsbury, then a region most fit for the contemplations of a meditative man. I had just moved into chambers at 4 Vernlam Buildings, Gray’s Inn, and so, by way of Theobald’s Road, I had easy access to the old, grave squares where life moved quietly and peaceably as if it were the life of a little country town. Grey square opened into grey square, silent street into silent street; all was decorous and remote from the roar of traffic and the rush of men. But few people ascended the steps of the dim old houses, but few descended them; the local tradesmen, all old established, old-fashioned, steady and good, called for orders and purveyed their wares in a sober way; Bloomsbury was silence and repose; and in its grey calm I pursued my anxious studies, and submitted my problems to myself.

The required notion came at last, not from within, nor even from Bloomsbury, but from without. I am not quite sure, but almost sure, that the needed hint was discovered in an introduction to Tristram Shandy written by that most accomplished man of letters, Mr. Charles Whibley. Mr. Whibley, in classifying Sterne’s masterpiece, noted that it might be called a picaresque of the mind, contrasting it with Gil Blas which is a picaresque of the body. This distinction had struck me very much when I read it; and now as I was puzzling my head to find a spring for the book that was to be written, Mr. Whibley’s dictum occurred to me, and applying it to another eighteenth century masterpiece, I asked myself why I should not write a Robinson Crusoe of the soul. I resolved forthwith that I would do so; I would take the theme of solitude, loneliness, separation from mankind, but, in place of a desert island and a bodily separation, my hero should be isolated in London and find his chief loneliness in the midst of myriads of myriads of men. His should be a solitude of the spirit, and the ocean surrounding him and disassociating him from his kind should be a spiritual deep. And here I found myself, as I thought, on sure ground; for I had had some experience of such things. For two years I had endured terrors of loneliness in my little room in Clarendon road, Notting Hill Gate, and so I was soundly instructed as to the matter of the work. I felt, in short, that I had my notion firmly by the tail; and so at once I set to work.

Not to writing, be it understood, but rather to the daily consideration of my topic; to taking it every night to bed with me as a child takes his toy; to putting it on the breakfast table beside my morning tea, again as a child with a new toy is apt to set it down on the cloth beside his plate of bread and butter. The notion (and my faithful bulldog Juggernaut) went with me on my dim Bloomsbury walks on grey mornings and wintry darkening afternoons, and when occasionally I went out and dined with a friend, the notion was in my pocket, and every now and then I would take it out, as it were, and glance at it for a moment, to make quite sure that it was safe and still there. Unnoticed, I put a few drops of the notion in the wine and sprinkled it lightly on the meat and found that it improved the aroma and flavor of both enormously; and whenever I was a little bored or down in the mouth and out of sorts, I took a couple of spoonfuls of the notion and felt better at once.

And then I began to plan it out on paper, and to try to reduce it to some logical form, to think of incidents that would show forth the idea to the best advantage, to determine the main course of the story, and now and again to write down “bits” that occurred to me. I proceeded in this manner for some weeks. The precious “notion” had been given me, let us say, toward the end of October, but it was not till early in February that I put pen to paper in dead earnest, and launched with a trembling heart on the first chapter. And then the trouble began.

For, in the first place, I had vowed myself, it will be remembered, to a change of style. Or rather, I was to abandon the manner in which The Three Impostors had been written, which was not my manner but Stevenson’s and to get a style, or something like a style, of my own. The gracious rounding of the sentence, the bright balance of words, the sonorous rise and fall of the cadences were done with; no more of costume; all was to be plain, everyday clothes. But it was a hard struggle. The player in private life does not want to “take the stage” as if he were Charles Surface in bloom-colored satin; but, on the other hand, he wants still less to enter a drawing room as if he had a game leg and a club foot: I had a horrible todo with my sentences in that first chapter. The old rules were gone, the new ones were yet to learn and most vilely I sweated at the task of learning them. The manuscript of that first chapter was a mass of erasures, corrections, interlineations. But somehow it was done, and, I thought, not so badly, all things considered. And then I started, more hopefully, at the second chapter. And then I was done.

I have said that I had planned the book out on paper, that I had, as it were, drawn it to scale, devising and arranging a due succession of incidents and events. And no sooner had I written two lines of that second chapter, according to plan, than I found that the book as planned could not be written at all. My clay model broke into bits in my hand. It had looked all right in the clay, but in the stone it most certainly would not do. It was a horrible moment.

For three weeks I sat down night after night with blank paper before me. Night after night I began to write that second chapter; night after night I groaned and shut up my desk. Sometimes the night’s work amounted to two lines; sometimes to two folios; but it was no good. There was neither life, nor fire, nor movement, nor reality in a word of it. Here was I with one chapter of the book finished and all the rest impossible. But all the same it was going to be done. I was as stubborn in those days as my good bulldog, Juggernaut; and I cannot say more than that.

And here I would say that to the best of my belief, I was brought to a dead stop precisely because I had explored the way and laid it out so thoroughly. I have told how I rolled the “notion” up and down and round about in my mind; how I planned and plotted and blew up the rocks and cut away the brushwood and felled the trees, so that there should be no difficulties in the track; and there was the mischief of it. For the truth is, that for me at any rate literature is always an exploration. The relish of it, the delight of it are indissolubly bound up with the sense of penetrating into a new world and an undiscovered region, of standing on some minor peak in Darien and looking on worlds that no eye has ever seen before. And this must be the sense of the scene as the actual words are written, as the ink flows from the pen⁠—or else there is nothing written that matters two straws. And in the affair of this particular book, I had taken such pains in exploring the ground that when I came to write it, there was nothing left to explore. Here were no miracles, no mysteries, no buried treasures, no unlooked for wonders. Everything was known, everything familiar, and all seemed quite devoid of significance.

Still, that book had got to be written, and was going to be written. And one happy night the whole matter of that famous second chapter was manifested to me. As far as I remember, in the original design, Lucian was at this point to be packed off to London to the miseries of the inevitable garret; now it seemed that there were further adventures for him in his native country. I thought of these and wrote them and so got the opportunity of dwelling a little longer among the dear woods and the domed hills and the memorable vales of my native Gwent, of trying once more to set down some faint echoes of the inexpressive song that the beloved land always sang to me and still sings across all the waste of weary years. Then I found somewhere or other, the recipe for the “Roman Chapter,” an attempted recreation of the Roman British world of Isca Silurum, Caerleon-on-Usk, the town where I was born, and soaked myself so thoroughly in the vision of the old golden city⁠—now a little desolate village⁠—and listened so long in the deep green of Wentwood for the clangour of the marching Legion and for the noise of their trumpets that I grew quite “dithery” as they say in some parts of England. I would go out on my dim Bloomsbury strolls, deep in my dream, and would “come to myself” with a sudden shock in Lamb’s Conduit Street or Mecklenburgh Square or in the solitudes of Great Coram Street, realizing certainly, that I was not, in actuality, in the Garden of Avallaunins or delaying in the Via Nympharum or on the Pons Saturni⁠—it is called Pont Sadwrn to this day⁠—but utterly at a loss to know exactly where I was or what I was doing, without the faintest notion of the various positions of north and south, east and west, and not at all clear as to how I was to get home to Gray’s Inn and my lunch. And it was in this queer way that the fourth chapter was accomplished. I was somewhat proud of it, and went on gaily through Chapters Five, Six and Seven, and had a month’s holiday in Provence, and came back to finish my book, feeling confident and in the best of spirits.

Alas! my pride had a deep fall indeed. I read over those last three chapters and saw suddenly that they were all hopelessly wrong, that they would not do at any price, that I had turned, unperceiving, from the straight path by ever so little, and had gone on, getting farther and farther away from the true direction till the way was hopelessly lost. I was in the middle of a black wood and I could not see any path out of it.

There was only one thing to be done. The three condemned chapters went into the drawer and I began over again from the end of Chapter Four. Five and Six were done, and then again I struggled desperately for many weeks, trying to find the last chapter. False tracks again, hopeless efforts, spoilt folios thick about me till by some chance or another, I know not how, the right notion was given me, and I wrote the seventh and last chapter in a couple of nights. Once more the thought of the old land had come to my help; the book was finished. It had occupied from first to last the labour of eighteen months.

Then I began to send the manuscript round to the publishers. The result would have melted the heart of the sourest cynic. To those hard men of business, as they are sometimes called, time was nothing, kindness everything. They wrote me, one after another, long letters in small writing on large quarto paper. They all implored me, as I loved them, not to publish this book because, as they explained, it was so poor and weak and dull that its publication would ruin what little reputation I had gained before.

One of these good men went farther. A month or two after he had refused The Hill of Dreams on folios of in quarto kindness, I saw amongst the “literary announcements” in some paper a paragraph which interested me deeply. It ran something like this:

“Mr. Blank the publisher and Mr. Dash an eminent man of letters have got hold of a promising idea for a romance. They propose, so Mr. Blank tells me, to describe the adventures of a lad who lives partly in the life of today and partly in the Roman world of the second century of our era. The plan seems a novel and arresting one and I look forward to reading the book next spring. The collaborators have not yet thought of a title for what should be a striking story.”

I chuckled. I knew that lad and whence he came: from Chapter Four of my MS. However, nothing more was heard of him in his revised and improved form. The Hill of Dreams was published in 1907, ten years after it had been finished.