Japp. From that moment on,
I have thought highly of his critical faculty; for when he
left us, he carried away the manuscript in his portmanteau.
Here, then, was everything to keep me up, sympathy, help, and
now a positive engagement. I had chosen besides a very easy
style. Compare it with the almost contemporary 'Merry Men',
one reader may prefer the one style, one the other - 'tis an
affair of character, perhaps of mood; but no expert can fail
to see that the one is much more difficult, and the other
much easier to maintain. It seems as though a full-grown
experienced man of letters might engage to turn out TREASURE
ISLAND at so many pages a day, and keep his pipe alight. But
alas! this was not my case. Fifteen days I stuck to it, and
turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the early
paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold. My
mouth was empty; there was not one word of TREASURE ISLAND in
my bosom; and here were the proofs of the beginning already
waiting me at the 'Hand and Spear'! Then I corrected them,
living for the most part alone, walking on the heath at
Weybridge in dewy autumn mornings, a good deal pleased with
what I had done, and more appalled than I can depict to you
in words at what remained for me to do. I was thirty-one; I
was the head of a family; I had lost my health; I had never
yet paid my way, never yet made 200 pounds a year; my father
had quite recently bought back and cancelled a book that was
judged a failure: was this to be another and last fiasco? I
was indeed very close on despair; but I shut my mouth hard,
and during the journey to Davos, where I was to pass the
winter, had the resolution to think of other things and bury
myself in the novels of M.
Pages:
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80