Part 9 (2/2)
In the sa MS notice written by ins of ether:--
”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 ood one servilely will betray the forh I sketched Roger Acton froe near Postford Pond as his ho 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 s, however, is an exact portrait of a hton So also with these tales, and others of s”
About ”The Twins” a curious and somewhat aard 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 soerous to invent blindly However, my total innocence of any intentional allusion to private norant 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 ofbeen taken some years after This is another instance of the literary perils to which iinative authors may be subject; for _litera scripta ht I know, that offhand word ht 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 Co an instalment; and I mentally sketchedcaether 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 ahere:
”If I had been gifted with the true prophetic power, hereabouts should old (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 uess, and will not now in a future edition surreptitiously interpolate such a suggestive incident, after the exanostic of that coldest January 7th It h that, for ht of such a not unlikely find: for the uselessness of the ht have furnished coous to as uttered by Tih 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 inality 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 lust of gold is shown in all its hideous deforh 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 ti from the pen of the celebrated Mr St John, when he was editor of the _Sunday Tiether:--
”In every page of this work there is so 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 frooody and the villain too hopelessly wicked: ”Heart”
has more merit, and has beenchapter 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 byto end, is nominally only edited It is a voluh the lines,”--and al rew naturally out of the simple circumstance that I used daily to ride out alone on one of my horses--more exactly,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 coh 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 hilad by easy perusal instead of costly purchase: and thus he is cheated of his second edition Most authors kno their interests are affected wholesale by that modern system of subscription libraries: but cheapness pleases the voracious multitude, and so in this competitive free-trade era the units who feed those devourers are sed up themselves However, ”what must be, must,”--_che sara sara_,--and I care not even to complain of what cannot be helped, and wins fah financially unprofitable to individual authorshi+p
In the scarce copy of ”aesop Smith” now before me, I find a fewOne has it, ”This book is actually autobiographical; but (as Rabelais did) I oftenpills, &c, and that &c is like one of coke's upon Littleton, full of hints to be amplified” Further, ”Let readers re before recent changes in our laws of lisho bearded, and no civilian was pers and many more, then unheard of but now coree es” Again: ”When Rabelais is diffuse, or a buffoon, or worse, it may be to throw disputers off the scent as to his real uori, aesop has written a book for the sake of a sentence, and veils his true intent in a designed mist of all sorts of uess for yourselves” The book includes a hundred and thirty original fables, essayettes, anecdotes, tirades, songs, and , 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 beca musical co 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 , though it occurs also in my extant volume of poems without it:--
_The Early Gallop_
”At five on a dewy h-, 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,--lad and grateful tongue to join The lark at hiswith cherubis praying anew, The birds and the bees and the whispering trees, And heather bedropt with dew-- To be one with those early worshi+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 A like this, Galloping over the downs!”