Treasure Island--it was Mr. Henderson who deleted the first title,
The Sea Cook--appeared duly in the story paper, where it figured in
the ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and attracted not the least
attention.  I did not care.  I liked the tale myself, for much the
same reason as my father liked the beginning:  it was my kind of
picturesque.  I was not a little proud of John Silver, also; and to
this day rather admire that smooth and formidable adventurer.  What
was infinitely more exhilarating, I had passed a landmark; I had
finished a tale, and written 'The End' upon my manuscript, as I had
not done since 'The Pentland Rising,' when I was a boy of sixteen
not yet at college.  In truth it was so by a set of lucky
accidents; had not Dr. Japp come on his visit, had not the tale
flowed from me with singular case, it must have been laid aside
like its predecessors, and found a circuitous and unlamented way to
the fire.  Purists may suggest it would have been better so.  I am
not of that mind.  The tale seems to have given much pleasure, and
it brought (or, was the means of bringing) fire and food and wine
to a deserving family in which I took an interest.  I need scarcely
say I mean my own.

But the adventures of Treasure Island are not yet quite at an end.
I had written it up to the map.  The map was the chief part of my
plot.  For instance, I had called an islet 'Skeleton Island,' not
knowing what I meant, seeking only for the immediate picturesque,
and it was to justify this name that I broke into the gallery of
Mr. Poe and stole Flint's pointer.  And in the same way, it was
because I had made two harbours that the Hispaniola was sent on her
wanderings with Israel Hands.  The time came when it was decided to
republish, and I sent in my manuscript, and the map along with it,
to Messrs. Cassell.  The proofs came, they were corrected, but I
heard nothing of the map.  I wrote and asked; was told it had never
been received, and sat aghast.  It is one thing to draw a map at
random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write up
a story to the measurements.  It is quite another to have to
examine a whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions
contained in it, and with a pair of compasses, painfully design a
map to suit the data.  I did it; and the map was drawn again in my
father's office, with embellishments of blowing whales and sailing
ships, and my father himself brought into service a knack he had of
various writing, and elaborately FORGED the signature of Captain
Flint, and the sailing directions of Billy Bones.  But somehow it
was never Treasure Island to me.

I have said the map was the most of the plot.  I might almost say
it was the whole.  A few reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, and
Washington Irving, a copy of Johnson's Buccaneers, the name of the
Dead Man's Chest from Kingsley's At Last, some recollections of
canoeing on the high seas, and the map itself, with its infinite,
eloquent suggestion, made up the whole of my materials.  It is,
perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it
is always important.  The author must know his countryside, whether
real or imaginary, like his hand; the distances, the points of the
compass, the place of the sun's rising, the behaviour of the moon,
should all be beyond cavil.  And how troublesome the moon is!  I
have come to grief over the moon in Prince Otto, and so soon as
that was pointed out to me, adopted a precaution which I recommend
to other men--I never write now without an almanack.  With an
almanack, and the map of the country, and the plan of every house,
either actually plotted on paper or already and immediately
apprehended in the mind, a man may hope to avoid some of the
grossest possible blunders.  With the map before him, he will
scarce allow the sun to set in the east, as it does in The
Antiquary.  With the almanack at hand, he will scarce allow two
horsemen, journeying on the most urgent affair, to employ six days,
from three of the Monday morning till late in the Saturday night,
upon a journey of, say, ninety or a hundred miles, and before the
week is out, and still on the same nags, to cover fifty in one day,
as may be read at length in the inimitable novel of Rob Roy.  And
it is certainly well, though far from necessary, to avoid such
'croppers.'  But it is my contention--my superstition, if you like-
-that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from
it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, and
not mere negative immunity from accident.  The tale has a root
there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the
words.  Better if the country be real, and he has walked every foot
of it and knows every milestone.  But even with imaginary places,
he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as he studies
it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he will
discover obvious, though unsuspected, short-cuts and footprints for
his messengers; and even when a map is not all the plot, as it was
in Treasure Island, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.



THE GENESIS OF 'THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE'



I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which I
lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac.  It was winter; the night was
very dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and sweet with the
purity of forests.  From a good way below, the river was to be
heard contending with ice and boulders:  a few lights appeared,
scattered unevenly among the darkness, but so far away as not to
lessen the sense of isolation.  For the making of a story here were
fine conditions.  I was besides moved with the spirit of emulation,
for I had just finished my third or fourth perusal of The Phantom
Ship.  'Come,' said I to my engine, 'let us make a tale, a story of
many years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and
civilisation; a story that shall have the same large features, and
may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the book you
have been reading and admiring.'  I was here brought up with a
reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which, as the sequel
shows, I failed to profit by.  I saw that Marryat, not less than
Homer, Milton, and Virgil, profited by the choice of a familiar and
legendary subject; so that he prepared his readers on the very
title-page; and this set me cudgelling my brains, if by any chance
I could hit upon some similar belief to be the centre-piece of my
own meditated fiction.  In the course of this vain search there
cropped up in my memory a singular case of a buried and
resuscitated fakir, which I had been often told by an uncle of
mine, then lately dead, Inspector-General John Balfour.

On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the thermometer below
zero, the brain works with much vivacity; and the next moment I had
seen the circumstance transplanted from India and the tropics to
the Adirondack wilderness and the stringent cold of the Canadian
border.  Here then, almost before I had begun my story, I had two
countries, two of the ends of the earth involved:  and thus though
the notion of the resuscitated man failed entirely on the score of
general acceptation, or even (as I have since found) acceptability,
it fitted at once with my design of a tale of many lands; and this
decided me to consider further of its possibilities.  The man who
should thus be buried was the first question:  a good man, whose
return to life would be hailed by the reader and the other
characters with gladness?  This trenched upon the Christian
picture, and was dismissed.  If the idea, then, was to be of any
use at all for me, I had to create a kind of evil genius to his
friends and family, take him through many disappearances, and make
this final restoration from the pit of death, in the icy American
wilderness, the last and the grimmest of the series.  I need not
tell my brothers of the craft that I was now in the most
interesting moment of an author's life; the hours that followed
that night upon the balcony, and the following nights and days,
whether walking abroad or lying wakeful in my bed, were hours of
unadulterated joy.  My mother, who was then living with me alone,
perhaps had less enjoyment; for, in the absence of my wife, who is
my usual helper in these times of parturition, I must spur her up
at all seasons to hear me relate and try to clarify my unformed
fancies.

And while I was groping for the fable and the character required,
behold I found them lying ready and nine years old in my memory.
Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot,
nine years old.  Was there ever a more complete justification of
the rule of Horace?  Here, thinking of quite other things, I had
stumbled on the solution, or perhaps I should rather say (in
stagewright phrase) the Curtain or final Tableau of a story
conceived long before on the moors between Pitlochry and
Strathardle, conceived in Highland rain, in the blend of the smell
of heather and bog-plants, and with a mind full of the Athole
correspondence and the memories of the dumlicide Justice.  So long
ago, so far away it was, that I had first evoked the faces and the
mutual tragic situation of the men of Durrisdeer.

My story was now world-wide enough:  Scotland, India, and America
being all obligatory scenes.  But of these India was strange to me
except in books; I had never known any living Indian save a Parsee,
a member of my club in London, equally civilised, and (to all
seeing) equally accidental with myself.  It was plain, thus far,
that I should have to get into India and out of it again upon a
foot of fairy lightness; and I believe this first suggested to me
the idea of the Chevalier Burke for a narrator.  It was at first
intended that he should be Scottish, and I was then filled with
fears that he might prove only the degraded shadow of my own Alan
Breck.  Presently, however, it began to occur to me it would be
like my Master to curry favour with the Prince's Irishmen; and that
an Irish refugee would have a particular reason to find himself in
India with his countryman, the unfortunate Lally.  Irish,
therefore, I decided he should be, and then, all of a sudden, I was
aware of a tall shadow across my path, the shadow of Barry Lyndon.
No man (in Lord Foppington's phrase) of a nice morality could go
very deep with my Master:  in the original idea of this story
conceived in Scotland, this companion had been besides intended to
be worse than the bad elder son with whom (as it was then meant) he
was to visit Scotland; if I took an Irishman, and a very bad
Irishman, in the midst of the eighteenth century, how was I to
evade Barry Lyndon?  The wretch besieged me, offering his services;
he gave me excellent references; he proved that he was highly
fitted for the work I had to do; he, or my own evil heart,
suggested it was easy to disguise his ancient livery wit a little
lace and a few frogs and buttons, so that Thackeray himself should
hardly recognise him.  And then of a sudden there came to me
memories of a young Irishman, with whom I was once intimate, and
had spent long nights walking and talking with, upon a very
desolate coast in a bleak autumn:  I recalled him as a youth of an
extraordinary moral simplicity--almost vacancy; plastic to any
influence, the creature of his admirations:  and putting such a
youth in fancy into the career of a soldier of fortune, it occurred
to me that he would serve my turn as well as Mr. Lyndon, and in
place of entering into competition with the Master, would afford a
slight though a distinct relief.  I know not if I have done him
well, though his moral dissertations always highly entertained me:
but I own I have been surprised to find that he reminded some
critics of Barry Lyndon after all. . . .



PREFACE TO 'THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE' {19}



Although an old, consistent exile, the editor of the following
pages revisits now and again the city of which he exults to be a
native; and there are few things more strange, more painful, or
more salutary, than such revisitations.  Outside, in foreign spots,
he comes by surprise and awakens more attention than he had
expected; in his own city, the relation is reversed, and he stands
amazed to be so little recollected.  Elsewhere he is refreshed to
see attractive faces, to remark possible friends; there he scouts
the long streets, with a pang at heart, for the faces and friends
that are no more.  Elsewhere he is delighted with the presence of
what is new, there tormented by the absence of what is old.
Elsewhere he is content to be his present self; there he is smitten
with an equal regret for what he once was and for what he once
hoped to be.

He was feeling all this dimly, as he drove from the station, on his
last visit; he was feeling it still as he alighted at the door of
his friend Mr. Johnstone Thomson, W.S., with whom he was to stay.
A hearty welcome, a face not altogether changed, a few words that
sounded of old days, a laugh provoked and shared, a glimpse in
passing of the snowy cloth and bright decanters and the Piranesis
on the dining-room wall, brought him to his bed-room with a
somewhat lightened cheer, and when he and Mr. Thomson sat down a
few minutes later, cheek by jowl, and pledged the past in a
preliminary bumper, he was already almost consoled, he had already
almost forgiven himself his two unpardonable errors, that he should
ever have left his native city, or ever returned to it.

'I have something quite in your way,' said Mr. Thomson.  'I wished
to do honour to your arrival; because, my dear fellow, it is my own
youth that comes back along with you; in a very tattered and
withered state, to be sure, but--well!--all that's left of it.'

'A great deal better than nothing,' said the editor.  'But what is
this which is quite in my way?'

'I was coming to that,' said Mr. Thomson:  'Fate has put it in my
power to honour your arrival with something really original by way
of dessert.  A mystery.'

'A mystery?' I repeated.

'Yes,' said his friend, 'a mystery.  It may prove to be nothing,
and it may prove to be a great deal.  But in the meanwhile it is
truly mysterious, no eye having looked on it for near a hundred
years; it is highly genteel, for it treats of a titled family; and
it ought to be melodramatic, for (according to the superscription)
it is concerned with death.'

'I think I rarely heard a more obscure or a more promising
annunciation,' the other remarked.  'But what is It?'

'You remember my predecessor's, old Peter M'Brair's business?'

'I remember him acutely; he could not look at me without a pang of
reprobation, and he could not feel the pang without betraying it.
He was to me a man of a great historical interest, but the interest
was not returned.'

'Ah well, we go beyond him,' said Mr. Thomson.  'I daresay old
Peter knew as little about this as I do.  You see, I succeeded to a
prodigious accumulation of old law-papers and old tin boxes, some
of them of Peter's hoarding, some of his father's, John, first of
the dynasty, a great man in his day.  Among other collections were
all the papers of the Durrisdeers.'

'The Durrisdeers!' cried I.  'My dear fellow, these may be of the
greatest interest.  One of them was out in the '45; one had some
strange passages with the devil--you will find a note of it in
Law's Memorials, I think; and there was an unexplained tragedy, I
know not what, much later, about a hundred years ago--'

'More than a hundred years ago,' said Mr. Thomson.  'In 1783.'

'How do you know that?  I mean some death.'

'Yes, the lamentable deaths of my lord Durrisdeer and his brother,
the Master of Ballantrae (attainted in the troubles),' said Mr.
Thomson with something the tone of a man quoting.  'Is that it?'

'To say truth,' said I, 'I have only seen some dim reference to the
things in memoirs; and heard some traditions dimmer still, through
my uncle (whom I think you knew).  My uncle lived when he was a boy
in the neighbourhood of St. Bride's; he has often told me of the
avenue closed up and grown over with grass, the great gates never
opened, the last lord and his old maid sister who lived in the back
parts of the house, a quiet, plain, poor, hum-drum couple it would
seem--but pathetic too, as the last of that stirring and brave
house--and, to the country folk, faintly terrible from some
deformed traditions.'

'Yes,' said Mr. Thomson.  Henry Graeme Durie, the last lord, died
in 1820; his sister, the Honourable Miss Katherine Durie, in '27;
so much I know; and by what I have been going over the last few
days, they were what you say, decent, quiet people and not rich.
To say truth, it was a letter of my lord's that put me on the
search for the packet we are going to open this evening.  Some
papers could not be found; and he wrote to Jack M'Brair suggesting
they might be among those sealed up by a Mr. Mackellar.  M'Brair
answered, that the papers in question were all in Mackellar's own
hand, all (as the writer understood) of a purely narrative
character; and besides, said he, "I am bound not to open them
before the year 1889."  You may fancy if these words struck me:  I
instituted a hunt through all the M'Brair repositories; and at last
hit upon that packet which (if you have had enough wine) I propose
to show you at once.'

In the smoking-room, to which my host now led me, was a packet,
fastened with many seals and enclosed in a single sheet of strong
paper thus endorsed:-


Papers relating to the lives and lamentable deaths of the late Lord
Durisdeer, and his elder brother James, commonly called Master of
Ballantrae, attainted in the troubles:  entrusted into the hands of
John M'Brair in the Lawnmarket of Edinburgh, W.S.; this 20th day of
September Anno Domini 1789; by him to be kept secret until the
revolution of one hundred years complete, or until the 20th day of
September 1889:  the same compiled and written by me,

EPHRAIM MACKELLAR,

For near forty years Land Steward on the
estates of His Lordship.

As Mr. Thomson is a married man, I will not say what hour had
struck when we laid down the last of the following pages; but I
will give a few words of what ensued.

'Here,' said Mr. Thomson, 'is a novel ready to your hand:  all you
have to do is to work up the scenery, develop the characters, and
improve the style.'

'My dear fellow,' said I, 'they are just the three things that I
would rather die than set my hand to.  It shall be published as it
stands.'

'But it's so bald,' objected Mr. Thomson.

'I believe there is nothing so noble as baldness,' replied I, 'and
I am sure there is nothing so interesting.  I would have all
literature bald, and all authors (if you like) but one.'

'Well, well,' said Mr. Thomson, 'we shall see.'



Footnotes:


{1}  First published in the Contemporary Review, April 1885

{2}  Milton.

{3}  Milton.

{4}  Milton.

{5} As PVF will continue to haunt us through our English examples,
take, by way of comparison, this Latin verse, of which it forms a
chief adornment, and do not hold me answerable for the all too
Roman freedom of the sense:  'Hanc volo, quae facilis, quae
palliolata vagatur.'

{6}  Coleridge.

{7}  Antony and Cleopatra.

{8}  Cymbeline.

{9}  The V is in 'of.'

{10}  Troilus and Cressida.

{11}  First published in the Fortnightly Review, April 1881.

{12}  Mr. James Payn.

{13}  A footnote, at least, is due to the admirable example set
before all young writers in the width of literary sympathy
displayed by Mr. Swinburne.  He runs forth to welcome merit,
whether in Dickens or Trollope, whether in Villon, Milton, or Pope.
This is, in criticism, the attitude we should all seek to preserve;
not only in that, but in every branch of literary work.

{14}  First published in the British Weekly, May 13, 1887.

{15}  Of the British Weekly.

{16}  First published in the Magazine of Art in 1883.

{17}  First published in the Idler, August 1894.

{18}  Ne pas confondre.  Not the slim green pamphlet with the
imprint of Andrew Elliot, for which (as I see with amazement from
the book-lists) the gentlemen of England are willing to pay fancy
prices; but its predecessor, a bulky historical romance without a
spark of merit, and now deleted from the world.

{19}  1889.