第19章 MY FIRST BOOK: 'TREASURE ISLAND' (2)

Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of 'Treasure Island,' the future character of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection.

The next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters.How often have I done so, and the thing gone no further! But there seemed elements of success about this enterprise.It was to be a story for boys; no need of psychology or fine writing; and I had a boy at hand to be a touchstone.Women were excluded.I was unable to handle a brig (which the HISPANIOLA should have been), but I thought I could make shift to sail her as a schooner without public shame.And then I had an idea for John Silver from which I promised myself funds of entertainment; to take an admired friend of mine (whom the reader very likely knows and admires as much as I do), to deprive him of all his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leave him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of the culture of a raw tarpaulin.Such psychical surgery is, I think, a common way of 'making character'; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way.

We can put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred words with us yesterday by the wayside; but do we know him? Our friend, with his infinite variety and flexibility, we know -but can we put him in? Upon the first, we must engraft secondary and imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from the second, knife in hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless arborescence of his nature, but the trunk and the few branches that remain we may at least be fairly sure of.

On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire, and the rain drumming on the window, I began THE SEA COOK, for that was the original title.I have begun (and finished)a number of other books, but I cannot remember to have sat down to one of them with more complacency.It is not to be wondered at, for stolen waters are proverbially sweet.I am now upon a painful chapter.No doubt the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe.No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe.I think little of these, they are trifles and details; and no man can hope to have a monopoly of skeletons or make a corner in talking birds.The stockade, Iam told, is from MASTERMAN READY.It may be, I care not a jot.These useful writers had fulfilled the poet's saying:

departing, they had left behind them Footprints on the sands of time, Footprints which perhaps another - and I was the other! It is my debt to Washington Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I believe plagiarism was rarely carried farther.I chanced to pick up the TALES OF ATRAVELLER some years ago with a view to an anthology of prose narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit, and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters - all were there, all were the property of Washington Irving.But I had no guess of it then as I sat writing by the fireside, in what seemed the spring-tides of a somewhat pedestrian inspiration; nor yet day by day, after lunch, as I read aloud my morning's work to the family.It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right eye.I had counted on one boy, I found I had two in my audience.My father caught fire at once with all the romance and childishness of his original nature.His own stories, that every night of his life he put himself to sleep with, dealt perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, old sailors, and commercial travellers before the era of steam.He never finished one of these romances; the lucky man did not require to! But in TREASURE ISLAND he recognised something kindred to his own imagination; it was HIS kind of picturesque; and he not only heard with delight the daily chapter, but set himself acting to collaborate.When the time came for Billy Bones's chest to be ransacked, he must have passed the better part of a day preparing, on the back of a legal envelope, an inventory of its contents, which Iexactly followed; and the name of 'Flint's old ship' - the WALRUS - was given at his particular request.And now who should come dropping in, EX MACHINA, but Dr.Japp, like the disguised prince who is to bring down the curtain upon peace and happiness in the last act; for he carried in his pocket, not a horn or a talisman, but a publisher - had, in fact, been charged by my old friend, Mr.Henderson, to unearth new writers for YOUNG FOLKS.Even the ruthlessness of a united family recoiled before the extreme measure of inflicting on our guest the mutilated members of THE SEA COOK; at the same time, we would by no means stop our readings; and accordingly the tale was begun again at the beginning, and solemnly re-delivered for the benefit of Dr.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.