CHAPTER XVI

THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS: PART I

MY active literary career dates from my return from America. Hitherto, with the exception of the _Handbook to Japan_ and the potboiler for the North German Lloyd, and a shilling shocker, published anonymously, and the two series of articles on Japan executed for the _San Francisco Chronicle_ and McClure’s Syndicate respectively, my literary aspirations had all been poetical. I had published volumes of my own verse entitled: _Frithjof and Ingebjorg_, _Australian Lyrics_, _A Poetry of Exiles_, _A Summer Christmas_, _In Cornwall and Across the Sea_, _Edward the Black Prince_, _The Spanish Armada_, _Lester the Loyalist_, and four anthologies, _Australian Ballads and Rhymes_, _A Century of Australian Song_, _Australian Poets and Younger American Poets_, one of which, _Australian Ballads_, had a very large sale, though I only had ten pounds for doing it.

But in America I had been under the necessity of making money, because my private income was unequal to the increased expense of living in America. The articles for McClure and the _San Francisco Chronicle_ were the outcome of this necessity, and having found that I could add materially to my income by writing about travel when in America, I conceived the idea of making my articles on Japan, a country then but little known in England, into a book. I went to Mr. A. P. Watt, then not many years established, and he procured me a commission from Hutchinson & Co.—the first of a series of commissions which has gone on from that day to this. That book was _The Japs at Home_, the most successful, in point of sales, of all my books, for not less than a hundred and fifty thousand copies of it have been sold by various publishers. Hutchinson & Co. brought out editions of it at eighteen shillings (two), six shillings, and three-and-six, and then, having got through four editions of it, and believing the sale at an end, gave the book up to me. Another publisher sold fifteen thousand copies of it at half-a-crown, and then exchanged the book rights with me for the serial rights, and since then there has been a shilling edition, an enormous sixpenny edition, and a threepenny-halfpenny edition; the shilling and the threepenny-halfpenny editions are selling still.

Following _The Japs at Home_ came _On the Cars and Off_, the success of which was ruined by having illustrations which took six weeks to produce. It was a guinea book, and a first edition of a thousand copies was sold directly. But the second edition was not ready till nearly two months later, and by that time the interest in the book was dead.

My next book of travel was _Brittany for Britons_, published as one of the familiar little half-crown guides of A. and C. Black, of which a great number of copies were sold. I cannot say how many, because I parted with the copyright.

After this my energies were diverted from travel-books for a while, because I wanted to try my hand at novel-writing. The result was _A Japanese Marriage_, which, after _The Japs at Home_, has been my most successful book in sales. About ten thousand copies of it were sold in octavo form, and as a sixpenny various publishers have sold a hundred and twenty thousand.

For two years after our return from America we confined ourselves to short excursions to the milder parts of England—Hampshire, chiefly round Norman Christchurch; Devonshire, in the nook of Dartmoor round Drewsteignton, and on the gloriously wild coast round Salcombe; and the woods of the Isle of Wight. During this period I finished _The Japs at Home_, and wrote _On the Cars and Off_, which was not published till 1895, about our double journey across America from Halifax to Vancouver’s Island.

Then a new interest came into my life—we were persuaded in 1895 to spend a summer and autumn at St. Andrews, and there I acquired the inevitable taste for golf, which has kept me interested and amused and healthful and unaging. Certainly this was one of the most fortunate inspirations we ever had for a holiday, since, after being devoted to games at school and College and in Australia, I had left off football and cricket and tennis, and even shooting, as soon as I settled in London.

Poor old Tom Morris never had a worse pupil, for I play everything wrong, and owe the prizes and medals I have won at golf to the straightness of eye which helped me to win every shooting challenge cup at Cheltenham and every shooting challenge cup at Oxford. At St. Andrews I not only had a glorious spell of golf, but fell deeply in love with romantic and historical Fifeshire. There are few places which combine so many attractions as St. Andrews. It is the capital of golf; its cliffs capped with old houses, and its ancient port, are beautiful enough for Sicily, and its great ruined castle and its immemorial cathedral make it architecturally the most interesting place in Scotland after Edinburgh and Stirling. Nor does it yield to many in historical interest. I should live there if it had a climate like Naples.

It gave us such a hunger for old architecture and romantic scenery that in the following summer we went to the old Breton towns on the Gulf of St. Malo. We stayed at St. Servan in a seventeenth-century _manoir_ called La Gentillerie, which we had from the chaplain, my school-friend, William Vassall, who stayed with us as our guest in his own house.

From a point close by we could look across the harbour to St. Malo, with its mediæval walls and crane’s-bill steeple, and on the other side were no further from Dinan. From St. Servan we went on for a month in Normandy, which I much prefer to Brittany. Towns like Rouen and Caen, Coutances and Bayeux, Evreux, Lisieux and Falaise, are citadels of mediævalism.

During this holiday I wrote my third travel-book, published in England, _Brittany for Britons_, issued a year later, and put the final touches on my first acknowledged novel, _A Japanese Marriage_.

It was my two books on Japan, _The Japs at Home_ and _A Japanese Marriage_, which helped me to gain a literary position; both went into several editions in their first year. Between them they have sold more than a quarter of a million copies.

But I was on the verge of a book-success of another kind, which could hardly be called a literary success, though more people connect my name with this than with any of my books. Messrs. A. & C. Black, who had published _A Japanese Marriage_ and _Brittany for Britons_, approached me to know if I would expand _Who’s Who_, of which they had just purchased the copyright.

They showed it to me, and asked me if I could turn it into a book of reference—a sort of cross between the old _Who’s Who_ and _Men of the Time_ was the idea which shaped itself from our discussion.

The two visits which we paid to Salcombe in Devon, the second of them with Reginald Cleaver, have not yet furnished me with any subject for writing.

The year 1896, in which I compiled the new _Who’s Who_, was also a notable year for me from the travel point of view. At last I faced the exertion of taking my family to Sicily, which had been my ambition for exactly ten years. It was not such a stereotyped journey as it is now. I began to make inquiries about it when we reached Naples, and could not find an Englishman in the place—even the Consul-General—who had ever been to Sicily. But the Consul-General made inquiries, and said that he did not think travelling in Sicily was very difficult or dangerous. He, however, asked me if I had a revolver, and recommended me not to take out a licence for it at the Consulate, because in Sicily a licence is not available for the whole island, but only for one province, and there are seven provinces. He also told me that he was quite sure that no Sicilian ever took out a licence, though they all carried firearms. As for malaria, he did not know; he never troubled about it; he always spent the summer in or near Naples, and never felt any the worse for it. This Consul was my great friend, Eustace Neville-Rolfe, who had lately sold his ancestral estate of Heacham in Norfolk. Nelson students will remember allusions in the great Admiral’s letters to his uncle Rolfe at Heacham. But my friend hated the climate of Norfolk, and hated its politics, and settled at Naples, where a good many years afterwards they made him Consul-General for the unconstitutional reason that he knew more about Naples than any living Englishman. He had the unique distinction of joining the Consular Service as a Consul-General.

When we got to Sicily we found it perfectly easy and safe. The Whitakers of Palermo, to whom he gave us an introduction, at once became our friends, and told us all we ought to see and all we ought to do in the island. On that trip we paid fairly exhaustive visits to Palermo, Taormina, Syracuse, Girgenti, Marsala, Trapani, Selinunte, and Segesta, and flying visits to Catania and Messina.

Sicily is an adorable country. Grass, flowers and fruit-trees grow right down to the edge of the sea, where there is any soil, for half the island is rock. There are no brigands on the sea-coasts, and nearly every monument worth visiting is in sight of the sea. There is not a place in the island from which you cannot see a mountain. It is the land of the orange and the lemon; and possesses the rare charm of ancient Greek and mediæval Arab architecture.

Sicily inspired me to write the largest of all my books, _In Sicily_, and inspired a publisher to produce it in an _édition de luxe_, whose two volumes weighed fourteen pounds, and contained four hundred illustrations. I called it _In Sicily_ because it was not until several years afterwards that I considered that I knew enough about the island to write a book with the more pretentious title of _Sicily_. A great French author paid me the compliment of appropriating my title, and a good deal of my information, a few years afterwards. I began to write _In Sicily_ in 1896, but it was not published till 1901.

We spent the spring of 1896 in Sicily, and the summer at Lulworth, on a little round cove in South Dorset. We went there partly because it was said to be the mildest place in England, partly because Thomas Hardy told me that he had laid the scene of one of the chief episodes in _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ in an old farmhouse near the station which served Lulworth; it had a hopelessly unromantic name—Wool.

In the following summer we went to Ostend for the season, because I wanted to see the gambling and the fashions. The morals of the Ostend of that day may be gathered from this. A friend of mine who was staying at the principal hotel with her husband, was asked by the proprietor if they were properly married. She was most indignant, and said that of course they were.

“Very well,” he said coolly, “then I think you ought to go to some other hotel, because you are the only people in mine who have been married.”

That same hotel manager considered that things were no longer what they were, for an Indian Maharajah had that morning complained at being charged two pounds for a chicken—that the English and Americans were no longer fools, and, in fact, that the only fools left were the Austrians.

The late King of the Belgians was in residence at the chateau, and had not one, but three, notorious French actresses staying with him.

Apart from its _plage_ and its gaming-tables, I should have found Ostend a dull place if it had not been for Henry Arthur Jones, who was there, off and on, writing a new play, and ready to discuss it. He had had a play at the St. James’s which had not gone too well, and he asked me if I could account for it. I suggested that allowing a hospital nurse to frustrate an elopement was more calculated to gratify the gallery than the stalls, and that the St. James’s was a stalls theatre.

Jones had one curious habit—whenever he felt at a standstill in writing his play he used to say he must have a change of air, and then fly away to Homburg or some other place which took many hours to reach. He was much interested in gambling, though he did not gamble seriously. I imagine that he found the gaming-tables full of “copy.”

In the winter we went to Sicily again, and in the summer to Salcombe again.

In the following winter my connection with _Who’s Who_ ceased. My agreement with the publishers was only for three years in case the book was a failure, and the publishers pronounced it a failure.

Almost immediately afterwards I had an attack of jaundice, brought on, or not brought on, by the incident, and after a short stay at Brighton, went to recruit my health at Nice, from which I paid many visits to Monte Carlo, though I did not gamble much.

On our way back from Nice we did what not one Englishman in a hundred, among the thousands who winter in the Riviera, does, got off at Tarascon, and wandered about the cities of Troubadour-land, such as Tarascon, Arles, Nîmes, Avignon and Les Baux, the deserted capital of a dead principality, where the houses, instead of being built, are hewn out of the face of the rock. Provence is full of ancient Roman buildings, and of Romanesque buildings, hardly to be distinguished from them; and, in our day, in spite of the law against it, they used the Roman amphitheatres for the modern equivalent of gladiatorial games—bull-fights. Bull-fighting always began on Easter Sunday.

I registered a resolve, which I have never kept, to write a book about Provence.

That summer we spent at Cookham on the Thames. Since we were unable to go abroad, we went on the river, as being the most frankly “Continental” place in England. We had perfect weather, and Ostend itself did not give us more pleasure than the reach of the river between Cookham and Maidenhead. I found lying in a punt outside the lock at the Cliveden end conducive for finding incidents for fiction.

And I had not done sufficient creative work since I began _Who’s Who_. Indeed, _The Admiral_, my novel of the love of Nelson and Lady Hamilton, which I finished at Ostend, had been nearly my whole output, for _Trincolox_ had been written ten years before, and published in _Temple Bar_. I was, of course, working at the materials for _In Sicily_ all the time, and in the spring of 1900 we paid another three months’ visit to Sicily to see that all my facts were up to date.

We were at Syracuse during the darkest days of the Boer War. About half the people in the house were Germans, who were openly pleased at the succession of disasters which had befallen the British arms before they could get proper forces out to South Africa, to fight an enemy who was prepared in every single detail before he forced on the war. It seemed as if the disasters never would stop, and these amiable people told us so every day. But one fine day a British battleship, one of the largest then afloat, steamed into the great harbour of Syracuse, and anchored in the waters where the Athenians were annihilated in their last sea-fight against the Syracusans. We were down on the quay, and so was nearly every other foreigner in Syracuse, when a launch put off from H.M.S., and made towards us. The Captain, a typical sea-dog—it was Callaghan, now one of our chief Admirals—was in the stern. As he stepped ashore he said: “We have just had a wireless from Malta—Kimberley is relieved.” It was most dramatic to have the news brought to us by the biggest battleship in the Mediterranean, how French had introduced a new feature into warfare by raising a siege with a dash of five thousand cavalry riding all day as hard as they could. I shall never forget it.

We returned to Rome in time for the Papal Jubilee, the sixth centenary of the original Jubilee established by Boniface VIII in 1300. Some of the ceremonies were extraordinarily interesting, and the procession of Leo XIII in St. Peter’s was one of the most impressive things I ever saw. I think it was that which inspired me to write _The Secrets of the Vatican_, though I did not complete it for publication till nearly seven years afterwards.

That summer again we went to Cookham, which had serious results, for my son was thrown into contact with some charming boys who had just passed into the Army, and were spending their vacation from Woolwich at Bourne End, a mile up the river from Cookham. Nothing would do for him after this but to go into the Army. I did not oppose it, because he was an absolutely idle boy at school, and it seemed such a good thing that he should want to pass any exam., and further, I was almost as much under the glamour of those dear boys—poor St. John Spackman, who was afterwards killed in the polo-field, was one of them—as he was.

That inspired me to write _My Son Richard_, which is a story of river life and boys who want to serve their country. I took him to Captain James, the leading Army crammer, and said that he wanted to get into the Army. In a few home questions, James discovered that he had never done any work at school, and said he had better go into the Artillery—he could not get into the Line. I looked incredulous, and he explained that in the Artillery exams. there are papers in more subjects which boys do not learn at school, so that a boy who has not done any work has not lost time over this—such things, for instance, as “fortification” and “military topography.”

My son amply fulfilled his prognostications by securing ninety per cent. of the marks in the military subjects, and only sixteen marks out of two thousand in Latin. Still, he passed, but, to his great disappointment, was not allowed to go out to the war which had just begun, because he was too young.

In this year, 1901, in which both my big book _In Sicily_ and my novel _My Son Richard_, first saw the light, I had plenty to do, for I was finishing and attending to the publication of _Queer Things about Japan_, which was the best received of all my books of travel. It owed its success largely to the timely moment at which I wrote it. Knowing Japan well, I was convinced that there was going to be a Russo-Japanese war, and Sidney Dark, the brilliant literary editor of the _Daily Express_, as alive a journalist and critic as there is in London, was at that time manager of the firm of publishers to whom I offered the book, because they had recently taken over the publication of the sixpenny edition of _A Japanese Marriage_. It was not hard to convince him that there was war in the air for Japan, and he commissioned the book with the happiest results. Much of it appeared serially in the papers connected with the Tillotson Syndicate, which at that time had Philip Gibbs for its editor. He accepted my offer to write him eight long instalments about Japan for the Syndicate. Just as I had finished and dispatched them, he wrote to tell me that he did not think that Japan was a sufficiently live subject, and asked me not to write the articles.

No sooner had he written the letter than he received the articles. He read them and thought them so good that he sent me a telegram cancelling his letter, and used them. They form the backbone of the book. He had asked me to be as humorous as possible. Other editors thought them very amusing, and when the approach of war made Japan the topic of the day, showered commissions on me.

Norma Lorimer, who was all through Japan with us, was of great assistance to me in recalling our life there, and I got her a good many commissions for articles, which were afterwards collected with some of the articles that I wrote during the war into _More Queer Things about Japan_.

In this same year, 1901, Hutchinson & Co. published _My Son Richard_, which, as I have said above, was a novel about boys who had just passed into the Army, and girls of the same age, spending the summer on the river at Cookham. As an instance of rapid printing, I may mention that Hutchinson got me all the proofs of this book in seven days, but he recently, in 1913, eclipsed this by making the printer give me all the proofs of _Weeds_ in six days.

_My Son Richard_ was very popular. A Duchess wrote to a newspaper which was collecting statistics about the popularity of books, that this was the nicest book she had ever read, and when it came out as a sixpenny, the village grocer at Cookham ordered hundreds and told me that every maidservant for miles round was buying it. I wish they would buy all my other sixpennies. To reach the servant class is a most difficult achievement.

As Miss Lorimer had broken her leg that year and still could not move about much, we went for August to Baveno on Lago Maggiore, to an hotel with a garden on the lake, where she had a room looking right over the exquisite Borromean Islands, Isola Bella and Isola dei Pescatori. Italy has always been her favourite subject for writing. She corrected the proofs of her _By the Waters of Sicily_ here, which is as popular as ever, though it has been out for twelve years.

Baveno had the happiest effect on her. The air is lovely, and her window looked right over the finest sweep of Lago Maggiore, with the islands in front and the snow-tipped Alps behind. Heavy square-prowed barges with junk sails used to glide slowly across the eye-line, and light high-prowed fishing-boats with hoods like Japanese sampans darted about near the shore, which had long pergolas overhanging the lake and Passion-vines sweeping over every shed.

A month’s rest at Baveno made her leg quite well, and then we were able to spend a fascinating September in the mountain city of Bergamo; Brescia, with its history and monuments of a thousand years; and Venice, which is always most adorable in summer. The Feast of the Redentore in July is the crown of the year at Venice. We had learnt, and we have often made use of our knowledge since, that Italy is at her best in summer.

I do not seem to have published any books in 1902 or 1903, though I was writing steadily all the time, and had a couple of serials running in a magazine, but I was collecting materials hard for the biggest piece of work I have ever accomplished. Those who take up _Sicily, the New Winter Resort_, a small octavo, and _In Sicily_, two immense quartos, will be surprised to hear that the smaller book contains a far greater amount of reading matter than the larger—half as much again, I should say—though the one costs five shillings net and the other three guineas. The Directors of the Rete Sicula, for whom I compiled the smaller book, stipulated that it was to be cheap in price and handy in form. This book is an encyclopædia of Sicily. It itemises every monument of any importance, every custom, every piece of scenery noted for its beauty, every railway station, and gives information about every name which comes prominently into the history or the mythology of the island. It also gives directions how every monument and beautiful piece of scenery is to be reached.

Nineteen hundred and two was the last summer which we spent at Cookham. My son was then at Woolwich, and we stayed at Cookham so that he could have his week-ends on the river. That winter and spring we again spent in Sicily and Italy. But that summer we spent at Tenby for the first time, because my son had now been gazetted to a Company of Artillery which was stationed at Pembroke Dock. Tenby I consider one of the most beautiful coast-places in the United Kingdom. It stands on a rock over the sea, and still retains a considerable portion of walls and towers built in the reign of the third Edward, and restored during the Spanish Armada scare in 1588. It has also a magnificent Gothic church, and one Gothic house. Its position is hard to beat, for its rock stands between two splendid stretches of sand, and when the wind blows on one side you are out of the wind on the other. On the north sands is a green bluff. If you walk inland it is easy to find deep woods, and if you walk across the golf-links (there is very good natural golf) you come on to noble downs with gorgeous precipices sheering down to the sea, and rich in the ruins of historic and prehistoric men—literally historic, for there is Geoffry of Monmouth’s castle of Manorbier, and far beyond, my ancestor Aylmer de Valence’s castle of Pembroke, which, like the castle of the Carews, rises out of the windings of the great haven of the West.

Such is Tenby, round which, under the name of Flanders, I built a romance in my novel, _The Unholy Estate_.

The golf-links served both Tenby and the naval and military officers at Pembroke Dock. Nearly every day I used to meet the Gunner and Infantry subalterns and captains disporting themselves on the links, and I was often over at Pembroke in the barracks. It was there that I picked up my knowledge of young soldiers, which I put into use in _The Unholy Estate_, _The Tragedy of the Pyramids_ and _The Curse of the Nile_.

The winter we generally spent in Italy, except the winter and spring of 1906, when we were once more in Sicily, and went across from Sicily to visit Tunis and Carthage.

In 1904 I was busy putting the finishing touches on two books about Japan, _More Queer Things about Japan_, the book in which I collaborated with Norma Lorimer, and _Playing the Game_, which in the cheap editions has had its name changed to _When We Were Lovers in Japan_. This book has been running serially in _Cassell’s Magazine_. It never had half the popularity or circulation of _A Japanese Marriage_, though it had much more value as a study of Japan and the Japanese, for it deals with the transition of Japan from a weak Oriental nation to one of the great powers of the world, and gives an acid picture of the futility of the diplomats to whom Great Britain entrusts her interests.

In this same year, 1904, Methuen brought out _Sicily, the New Winter Resort_. In 1905 I turned my attention to Sicily once more, working up the serial which had appeared in _Cassell’s Magazine_ into the volume which the publishers insisted on christening _A Sicilian Marriage_, to try and lend it some of the popularity of _A Japanese Marriage_, which it never acquired, and the world never discovered that it was an excellent popular guide-book to Palermo, Girgenti, Syracuse and Taormina.

In the same year I brought out _Queer Things about Sicily_, a companion volume to _Queer Things about Japan_, with Norma Lorimer.