My Life as an Author Part 9

"Now, reader, one little preliminary parley with you about myself. Here beginneth the trouble of authors.h.i.+p, but it is a trouble causing ease; ease from thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, which never cease to make one's head ache till they are fixed on paper; ease from dreams by night and reveries by day (thronging up in crowds behind, like Deucalion's children, or a serried host in front, like Jason's instant army), hara.s.sing the brain, and struggling for birth, a separate existence, a definite life,--ease, in a cessation of that continuous internal hum of aerial forget-me-nots, clamouring to be recorded. O happy unimaginable vacancy of mind, to whistle as you walk for want of thought! O mental holiday, now as impossible to me as to take a true schoolboy's interest in rounders and prisoner's base! An author's mind,--and remember always, friend, I write in character, so judge not as egotistic vanity merely the well playing of my _role_,--such a mind is not a sheet of smooth wax, but a magic stone indented with fluttering inscriptions,--no empty tenement, but a barn stored to bursting--it is a painful pressure, constraining to write for comfort's sake,--an appet.i.te craving to be satisfied, as well as a power to be exerted,--an impetus that longs to get away, rather than a dormant dynamic--thrice have I (let me confess it) poured forth the alleviating volume as an author, a real author, real, because, for very peace of mind, involuntary,--but still the vessel fills,--still the indigenous crop springs up, choking a better harvest, seeds of foreign growth,--still these Lernaean necks sprout again, claiming with many mouths to explain, amuse, suggest, and controvert, to publish invention, and proscribe error. Truly it were enviable to be less apprehensive, less retentive,--to be fitted with a colander-mind, like that penal cask which forty-nine Danades might not keep from leaking; to be, sometimes at least, suffered for a holiday to ramble brainless in the paradise of fools. Memory, imagination, zeal, perceptions of men and things, equally with rank and riches, have often cost their full price, as many mad have known; they take too much out of a man, fret, wear, worry him,--to be irritable is the conditional tax laid of old upon an author's intellect; the crowd of internal imagery makes him hasty, quick, nervous, as a haunted, hunted man--minds of coa.r.s.er web heed not how small a thorn rends one of so delicate a texture,--they cannot estimate the wish that a duller sword were in a tougher scabbard,--the river, not content with channel and restraining banks, overflows perpetually,--the extortionate exacting armies of the ideal and the causal persecute MY spirit, and I would make a patriot stand at once to vanquish the invaders of my peace. I write these things only to be quit of them, and not to let the crowd increase,--I have conceived a plan to destroy them all, as Jehu and Elijah with the priests of Baal; I feel Malthusian among my mental nurslings; a dire resolve has filled me to effect a premature destruction of the literary populace superfaetating in my brain,--plays, novels, essays, tales, homilies, and rhythmicals; for ethics and poetics, politics and rhetorics, will I display no more mercy than sundry commentators of maltreated Aristotle. I will exhibit them in their state chaotic,--I will addle the eggs, and the chicken shall not chirp,--I will reveal, and secrets shall not waste me; I will write, and thoughts shall not batten on me."

The whole volume, as before-mentioned, is an epitome or quintessence of more than thirty works,--perhaps the best being "The Prior of Marrick,"

a story of idolatry; "Anti-Xurion," a crusade against razors; and "The Author's Tribunal," an oration; but I confess, not having looked at the book since my hair was black (and now it is snow-white), and considering that I wrote it forty-five years ago, I am surprised to find how well worth reading is my old Author's Mind. It may some day attain a resurrection: possibly even, in more than the skeleton form of its present appearance, muscles and skin being added, in a detailed filling up and finis.h.i.+ng of these mere sketches, if only time and opportunity were given to me. But I much fear at my time of life that my Tragedy of Nero must remain unwritten, as also my Novel of Charlotte Clopton, and that thrilling Handbook of the Marvellous; not to mention my abortive Epic of Home, and sundry essays, satires, and other lucubrations which, alas! may now be considered addled eggs. In a last word, I somewhat vaingloriously claim for authors.h.i.+p, as thus:--

_The Cathedral Mind._

"Temple of truths most eloquently spoken, Shrine of sweet thoughts veil'd round with words of power, The Author's Mind in all its hallowed riches Stands a Cathedral; full of precious things-- Tastefully built in harmonies unbroken, Cloister and aisle, dark crypt and aery tower; Long-treasured relics in the fretted niches And secret stores, and heaped-up offerings, Art's n.o.blest wealth with Nature's fruit and flower.

Paintings and Sculpture, Summer's best, and Spring's, Its plenitude of pride and praise betoken; An ever-burning lamp s.h.i.+nes in its soul; Deep music all around enchantment flings; And G.o.d's great Presence consecrates the whole!"

Probabilities.

In this our day, Agnosticism, if not avowed Atheism, seems to be making great way, and destroying the happiness of thousands. It may be a truth, though partly an unpleasant one, that "he has no faith who never had a doubt," even as "he has no hope who never had a fear." Well, in my short day and in my own small way I seem to have been through everything, and there was a time when I was much worried with uninvited difficulties and involuntary unbeliefs. Such troublesome thoughts seemed to come to me without my wish or will,--and stayed too long with me for my peace: however, I searched them out and fought them down, and cleared my brain of such poisonous cobwebs by writing my "Probabilities, an Aid to Faith;" a small treatise on the antecedent likelihood of everything that has happened, which did me great good while composing it, and has (to my happy knowledge from many grateful letters) enlightened and comforted hundreds of unwilling misbelievers. The book, after four editions, has now long been out of print; however, certainly I still wish it was in the hands of modern sceptics for their good. The scheme of the treatise is briefly this: I begin by showing the antecedent probability of the being of a G.o.d, then of His attributes, and by inference from His probable benevolence, of His becoming a Creator: then that the created being inferior to His perfection might fall, in which event His benevolence would find a remedy. But what remedy? That Himself should pay the penalty, and effect a full redemption. How? By becoming a creature, and so lifting up the race to Himself through so generous a condescension. I show that it was antecedently probable that the Divinity should come in humble form, not to paralyse our reason by outward glories,--that He might even die as a seeming malefactor; this was the guess of Socrates: and that for the trial of our faith there are likely to be permitted all manner of difficulties and mysteries for us to gain personal strength by combating and living them down. Many other topics are touched in this suggestive little treatise, whereanent a few critiques are available; as thus, "The author has done good service to religion by this publication: it will shake the doubts of the sceptical, strengthen the trust of the wavering, and delight the faith of the confirmed. As its character becomes known, it will deservedly fill a high place in the estimation of the Christian world."--_Britannia._ And similarly of other English journals, while the Americans were equally favourable. Take this characteristic instance, one of many: the _Brooklyn Eagle_ maintains that "the author is one of the rare men of the age; he turns up thoughts as with a plough on the sward of monotonous usage." And _Hunt's Magazine_, New York, commends "this reasoning with the sceptical, showing that if they consider probabilities simply, then all the great doctrines of our faith might reasonably be expected."

An extract from the book itself, as out of print, may be acceptable, the more so that it takes a new and true view (as I apprehend) of Job and his restored prosperity:--

"One or two thoughts respecting Job's trial. That he should at last give way was only probable: he was, in short, another Adam, and had another fall, albeit he wrestled n.o.bly. Worthy was he to be named among G.o.d's chosen three, 'Noah, Daniel, and Job,' and worthy that the Lord should bless his latter end. This word brings me to the point I wish to touch on,--the great compensation which G.o.d gave to Job. Children can never be regarded as other than individualities, and notwithstanding Eastern feelings about increase in quant.i.ty, its quality is, after all, the question for the heart. I mean that many children to be born is but an inadequate return for many children dying. If a father loses a well-beloved son, it is small recompense of that aching void that he gets another. For this reason of the affections, and because I suppose that thinkers have sympathised with me in the difficulty, I wish to say a word about Job's children lost and found. It will clear away what is to some minds a moral and affectionate objection. Now this is the state of the case.

"The patriarch is introduced to us as possessing so many camels and oxen, and so forth, and ten children. All these are represented to him by witnesses, to all appearance credible, as dead; and he mourns for his great loss accordingly. Would not a merchant feel to all intents and purposes a ruined man, if he received a clear intelligence from different parts of the world at once that all his s.h.i.+ps and warehouses had been destroyed by hurricanes and fire? Faith given, patience follows: and the trial is morally the same, whether the news be true or false.

"Remarkably enough, after the calamitous time is past, when the good man of Uz is discerned as rewarded by heaven for his patience by the double of everything once lost--his children remain the same in number, ten. It seems to me quite possible that neither camels, &c., nor children, really had been killed. Satan might have meant it so, and schemed it; and the singly coming messengers believed it all, as also did the well-enduring Job. But the scriptural word does not go to say that these things happened; but that certain emissaries said they happened. I think the devil missed his mark--that the messengers were scared by some abortive diabolic efforts; and that (with a natural increase of camels, &c., meanwhile) the patriarch's paternal heart was more than compensated at the last by the restoration of his own dear children. They were dead, and are alive again; they were lost, and are found. Like Abraham returning from Mount Calvary with Isaac, it was the resurrection in a figure.

"If to this view objection is made, that, because the boils of Job were real, therefore similarly real must be all his other evils; I reply, that in the one temptation, the suffering was to be mental; in the other, bodily. In the latter case, positive personal pain was the gist of the matter--in the former, the heart might be pierced, and the mind be overwhelmed, without the necessity of any such incurable affliction as the children's deaths amount to. G.o.d's mercy may well have allowed the evil one to overreach himself; and when the restoration came, how double was the joy of Job over these ten dear children!

"Again, if any one will urge that, in the common view of the case, Job at the last really has twice as many children as before, for that he has ten old ones in heaven, and ten new ones on earth,--I must, in answer, think that explanation as unsatisfactory to us as the verity of it would have been to Job. Affection, human affection, is not so numerically nor vicariously consoled--and it is, perhaps, worth while here to have thrown out (what I suppose to be) a new view of the case, if only to rescue such wealth as children from the infidel's sneer of being confounded with such wealth as camels. Moreover, such a paternal reward was anteriorly more probable."

CHAPTER XV.

THE CROCK OF GOLD, ETC.

The origin of the "Crock of Gold" is so well given in a preface, written by Mr. Butler of Philadelphia, for his American edition of my works in 1851, that I choose here to reproduce it, as below. Our cousins over the water were characteristically very fond of the "Crock of Gold," and some editions of "Proverbial Philosophy" were published by them as "by the author of the 'Crock of Gold'" on the t.i.tle-page, whereof I have a copy.

Moreover, it was dramatised and acted at "the Boston Museum, Tremont Street"--a playbill which I have announcing the twenty-first representation, November 1, 1845; the writer sent it to me in MS., where it lies among the chaos of my papers. In England it has been issued five times in various forms, and a printed play thereof as adapted by Fitzball, who wrote for Astley's and the like, was acted (without my leave asked or granted) in November 1847, at the City of London Theatre in the East End: I did not stop it, as on a certain private scrutiny I saw that the influence of the play upon its crowded audiences seemed a good one. Unseen and unknown in a private box I noted the touching effect of Grace's Psalm (ch. viii.) and the sobs and tears all over the theatre that accompanied it; so it was a wisdom not to interfere with such wholesome popularity and wholesale good-doing. It was a fair method of preaching the Gospel to the poor, for that crowd was of the humblest.

The "Crock of Gold" has been translated complete as a _feuilleton_ both in French and German by newspapers; and I have copies somewhere,--but I know not who wrote the French, the German auth.o.r.ess having been the Fraulein Von Lagerstrom.

What Mr. Butler says in his preface, no doubt after speech with me, for I was his visitor at the time in 1851, is this:--

"All who have had the good fortune to meet Mr. Tupper during his visit here have been struck with his characteristic impulsiveness. In accordance with this feature of his mind, nearly all of his most successful performances have been occasioned by something altogether incidental and unpremeditated--the result of an impulse accidentally--shall we not say, providentially?--imparted. It was so with the first work in this series (four volumes) respecting the composition of which he has given to me in conversation the following account. Some years ago he purchased a house at Brighton. While laying out the garden, he had occasion to have several drains made. One day observing a workman, Francis Suter, standing in one of the trenches wet and wearied with toil, Mr. Tupper said to him in a tone of pleasantry, 'Wouldn't you like to dig up there a crock full of gold?'--'If I did,'

said the man, 'it would do me no good, because merely finding it would not make it mine.'--'But suppose you could not only find such a treasure, but might honestly keep it, wouldn't you think yourself lucky?'--'Oh yes, sir, I suppose I should--but,' after a pause, 'but I am not so sure, sir, that it is the best thing that could happen to me.

I think, on the whole, I would rather have steady work and fair wages all the season than find a crock of gold.'

"Here was wisdom. The remark of the honest trench-digger at once set in motion a train of thought in the mind of the author. He entered his study, wrote in large letters on a sheet of paper these words, 'The Crock of Gold, a Tale of Covetousness,' and in less than a week that remarkable story was written. By the advice of his wife, however, he spent another week in rewriting it, and then gave it to the world in its finished state."

In the same Butlerian volume occurs the following MS. notice written by me (in about 1853) respecting the origins of my two other tales, the three being issued together:--

"As in the instance of my 'Crock of Gold,' both 'The Twins' and 'Heart'

were undoubtedly the outcome in after years of early observations, anecdotes, and incidents, whereof memory kept in silence an experimental record. Very few artists succeed in the delineation of life without living models; but no good one servilely will betray the forms they rather get hints from than actually copy. Thus though I sketched Roger Acton from one Robert Tunnel, an Albury labourer, and took the cottage near Postford Pond as his home,--adding thereto Mr. Campion's park and house at Danney, near Hurst (I was then living at Brighton) as the model for Sir John Vincent's estate,--as well as Grace, Ben Burke, and so on from persons I had seen,--I need not say that my sketches from nature were but outlines to my finished work of art. Simon Jennings, however, is an exact portrait of a man I knew at Brighton. So also with these tales, and others of my writings."

About "The Twins" a curious and somewhat awkward coincidence happened, in the fact that my totally ideal characters of General Tracey and his family were supposed to be intended for some persons whom the cap (it seems) fitted pretty accurately, and who then lived at the southern watering-place I had too diaphanously depicted as Burleigh-Singleton. It is somewhat dangerous to invent blindly. However, my total innocence of any intentional allusion to private matters whereof I was entirely ignorant was set clear at once by an explanatory letter; and so no harm resulted. In the case of "Heart" similarly, I invented the bankruptcy of a certain Austral Bank, which at the time of my tale's publication had no existence,--the very name having been taken some years after. This is another instance of the literary perils to which imaginative authors may be subject; for _litera scripta manet_, especially if in printer's ink, and, for aught I know, that offhand word might be held a continuous libel. For all else, by way of notice, the stories speak for themselves; as, Covetousness was the text for "The Crock of Gold," while Concealment and False Witness are severally the _morale_ of "The Twins" and "Heart."

I once meditated ten tales, on the Ten Commandments, these three being an instalment; and I mentally sketched my fourth upon Idolatry, "The Prior of Marrick," but nothing came of it. The Decalogue hangs together as a whole, and cannot be cut into ten distinct subjects without reference to one another.

In the chapter headed "The find of the Heartless," I find a ma.n.u.script note perhaps worth printing here:

"If I had been gifted with the true prophetic power, hereabouts should my heartless hero have stumbled on a big nugget of gold (I wrote before the Australian gold discovery), even as the shrewd Defoe invented for his Robinson Crusoe in Juan Fernandez, where gold has not yet been found, though it may be. However, I did not originally make the splendid guess, and will not now in a future edition surrept.i.tiously interpolate such a suggestive incident, after the example of dishonest Murphy in his prognostic of that coldest January 7th. It may be true enough that, for my story's sake, I may wish I had thought of such a not unlikely find: for the uselessness of the mere metal to a positively starving man in the desert might have furnished comment a.n.a.logous to what was uttered by Timon of Athens; and would have been picturesque enough and characteristic withal."

Here may follow a bit of notice for each tale from two critics of eminence,--as copied from one of my Archive-books, for memory is treacherous, and I must not invent. Of the "Crock of Gold" Mr. Ollier wrote as follows:--

"A story of extraordinary power, and, which is a still greater eulogy, of power devoted to a great and beneficent purpose. Mr. Martin Tupper (the author) is already known to the world by his 'Proverbial Philosophy,' and other works which indicate an extraordinarily gifted mind and an originality of conception and treatment rare indeed in these latter days,--but he has never demonstrated these qualities to such perfection as in his present deeply interesting work, wherein romance is united to wisdom, and both to practical utility. Terror is there in its sternest shape--the hateful l.u.s.t of gold is shown in all its hideous deformity and inconceivable meanness, and through the awful suspense that hovers over the incidents, occasional gleams of pure and hallowed love come to humanise the darkness. This is cue of the few fictions constructed to stand the shocks of time."

And of the other tales we find the following from the pen of the celebrated Mr. St. John, when he was editor of the _Sunday Times_. He speaks of the three tales together:--

"In every page of this work there is something which a reader would wish to bear in his memory for ever. For power of animated description, for eloquent reflections upon the events of everyday life, and for soft, touching, pathetic appeals to the best feelings of the heart, these tales are worthy of a place on every library table in the kingdom. They are well calculated to add to the author's already established reputation."

Of this trilogy of tales, undoubtedly the best is the "Crock of Gold:"

"The Twins," though written from living models, is very inferior, as the hero is too goody-goody and the villain too hopelessly wicked: "Heart"

has more merit, and has been much praised by a celebrated auth.o.r.ess for its touching chapter on Old Maids. Much of it also is autobiographical, as with "The Twins."

CHAPTER XVI.

aeSOP SMITH.

"aesop Smith's Rides and Reveries" is one of the books which, really written by me from beginning to end, is nominally only edited. It is a volume of self-experiences, to be read "through the lines,"--and almost every incident and character therein is drawn from living models and actual facts. It grew naturally out of the simple circ.u.mstance that I used daily to ride out alone on one of my horses--more exactly, mares--Minna and Brenda, and jotted down my cantering fancies in prose or verse when I got home. Hurst & Blackett were its publishers in 1858,--and it soon was all sold off, but did not come to a second edition in London, though reproduced widely in New York and Philadelphia. The fact is that, between an independent publisher who sells a little over cost price, and a Gargantua purchaser of thousands at a time, like Smith or Mudie, the poor author is sacrificed: he has received his fee for the edition (I got 100 for this first and only) and forthwith finds himself dismissed, while the reading public is made glad by easy perusal instead of costly purchase: and thus he is cheated of his second edition. Most authors know how their interests are affected wholesale by that modern system of subscription libraries: but cheapness pleases the voracious mult.i.tude, and so in this compet.i.tive free-trade era the units who feed those devourers are swallowed up themselves. However, "what must be, must,"--_che sara sara_,--and I care not even to complain of what cannot be helped, and wins fame to the one, whilst it does good to the many, though financially unprofitable to individual authors.h.i.+p.

In the scarce copy of "aesop Smith" now before me, I find a few ma.n.u.script notes of mine perhaps worth transcribing. One has it, "This book is actually autobiographical; but (as Rabelais did) I often mix up irrelevant and extraneous matter by way of gilding pills, &c., and that &c. is like one of c.o.ke's upon Littleton, full of hints to be amplified." Further, "Let readers remember that this book was written and published long before recent changes in our laws of marriage and divorce and libel: also when no Englishman dared to go bearded, and no civilian was permitted to be armed. In advocacy of all these things and many more, then unheard of but now common, I was in advance of the age; and in some degree my private notions conduced to very wholesome public changes." Again: "When Rabelais is diffuse, or a buffoon, or worse, it may be to throw disputers off the scent as to his real mark of satire or philosophy. Perhaps, like Liguori, aesop has written a book for the sake of a sentence, and veils his true intent in a designed mist of all sorts of miscellaneous matter. I shan't tell you clearly, but you may guess for yourselves." The book includes a hundred and thirty original fables, essayettes, anecdotes, tirades, songs, and musings, all of which thronged my brain as I cantered along, and were set down in black and white as soon as I got home. Stay: some were even pencilled in the saddle,--in especial this, which became very popular afterwards, particularly in the charming musical composition thereof by Mrs.

Stafford Bush, and as sung by Mr. Fox at St. James's Hall and elsewhere.

It was printed in an earliest edition of my Ballads and Poems (Hall & Virtue), and is headed there, "Written in the saddle on the crown of my hat." I reproduce it here for the sake of that heading, though it occurs also in my extant volume of poems without it:--

_The Early Gallop._

"At five on a dewy morning, Before the blaze of day, To be up and off on a high-mettled horse, All care and danger scorning, Over the hills away,-- To drink the rich sweet breath of the gorse, And bathe in the breeze of the downs.-- Ha! man, if you can,--match bliss like this In all the joys of towns!

"With glad and grateful tongue to join The lark at his matin hymn, And thence on faith's own wing to spring And sing with cherubim!

To pray from a deep and tender heart With all things praying anew, The birds and the bees and the whispering trees, And heather bedropt with dew.-- To be one with those early wors.h.i.+ppers, And pour the carol too!

"Then off again with a slackened rein And a bounding heart within, To dash at a gallop over the plain Health's golden cup to win!

This, this is the race for gain and grace, Richer than vases and crowns; And you that boast your pleasures the most Amid the steam of towns, Come taste true bliss in a morning like this, Galloping over the downs!"