The Record of Nicholas Freydon / An Autobiography

by A. J. Dawson

Sidney Heron, the man who had introduced me to the country round about Leith Hill, was the first visitor received in my Dorking lodging. He came one Saturday morning when I had resumed work (though the doctor knew it not), and returned to town on the Sunday night.

I think Heron enjoyed his visit, though, out of consideration for my lack of condition, he walked less than he would have chosen. It was a real pleasure to me to have him there; and, in the retrospect, I can clearly see that I was powerfully stimulated by talk with him on literary subjects. So much was this so, that on the Saturday night when I lay down in bed I found my brain in a ferment of activity. I read for half an hour; but even then, after blowing out my candle, the plots of new books, ideas for future work, literary schemes of every sort and kind, all promising quite remarkable success, were spinning through my mind in most exhilarating fashion. The morning found me somewhat weary, though not unpleasantly so; and consideration of all this made me realise, as I had not realised before, the isolation and retirement of my life there in Dorking; the very marked change it represented from the busy routine of days spent in the Advocate office. I prized my retirement more than ever after this.

'For,' I thought, 'of what use or purport was all that ceaseless mental stress and fret in London? It was all quite barren and fruitless, really. Whereas, here--one can develop thoughts here. This life makes creative work possible.'

I am afraid I gave no credit to Heron, or to the stimulating effects upon my own mind of contact with his bracing, if somewhat harsh, intelligence. All was attributed by me at the time to the advantages of my sequestered life. The effect of mental stimulus was not by any means so evanescent as such things often are, and the Monday following upon Heron's return to town saw me hard at work upon the book which I had outlined and begun before my illness.

There followed, in that modest little cottage room of mine, some three or four months of incessant work at high pressure; long days, and nights, too, at the table, during which my only exercise and relaxation in a week would be an occasional five minutes' walk to the post-office, or a stroll after midnight, when I found the cool night silence soothed me greatly before going to my bedroom. The doctor's counsels were all forgotten, of course, or remembered only in odd moments, as when going to bed, or shaving in the morning. Then I would promise myself reformation when the book was finished. That done I would live by rote and acquire bucolic health, I told myself.

In most respects that period was thoroughly typical of my life during the next half dozen years. When the end of a book was reached, there came the long and wearing process of its revision. Then interviews with publishers, the correction of proof sheets, the excogitation of writings for magazines--fuel for the fire that kept my pot a-boiling. There were intervals of acute mental weariness, and there were intervals of acute bodily distress. But the intervals of reformed living, when they came at all, were too brief and spasmodic to make a stronger or a healthier man of me. My business visits to London were sometimes made to embrace friendly visits to Sidney Heron's lodgings. Two or three times I dined with Arncliffe, and very occasionally I was visited at Dorking by two of the literary journalists who had joined Arncliffe's staff at the time of his appointment.

With but very few exceptions the critics were very kindly to my published work, and I apprehend that other writers who read their reviews of my books must have thought of me as one of the coming men. (The early nineties was a prolific period in the matter of 'coming men.') I even indulged that thought myself for a time. But not, I think, for very long. Like every other writer who ever lived, I would have liked to reach a large and appreciative audience. But I had the most lofty scorn for the methods by which I supposed such an achievement might be accomplished.

For a long time I sincerely believed that it was not from any lack of substance, style, merit, or quality that my books failed to reach a really large public; but, rather, that they were without a certain vulgarity which would commend them to the multitude. If not precisely that they were too good, I doubtless thought that, whilst good in every literary sense, they happened to be couched in a vein only to be appreciated by the subtler minds of the minority. The critics certainly helped me to sustain this congenial theory; and it was not until long afterwards that I accepted (with more, perhaps, of sadness or sourness than philosophy) the conclusion that if my work never had appealed to a big audience, the simple reason was that it was not big enough to reach so far. It was perhaps, within the limits of literary judgment, to some extent praiseworthy. And it won praise. I should have been content.

I certainly was not content, and I dare say the life I led was too far removed from the normal, both socially and from a health standpoint, to permit of content for me, quite apart from any question of personal temperament or idiosyncrasy. I worked and I slept, and that was all. That is probably not enough for the purchase of healthy content; at all events, where the work is sedentary and productive of strain upon the mind, nerves, and emotions.

As society is constituted in England to-day, a man of my sort may be almost as completely isolated, socially, in a place like Dorking as he would expect to be in the middle of the Sahara. The labouring sort of folk, the trades-people, and the landowners and county families, each form compact social microcosms. The latter class, in normal circumstances, remains not so much indifferent to as unaware of the existence of such people as myself, as bachelors in country-town lodgings. The other two compact little worlds had nothing to offer me socially. And so, socially, I had no existence at all.