Feeling that the public would like to know the secret of one of the most remarkable literary successes on record—more than six millions of his books have been sold—one night when I had run in to see him, I got him to tell me his story over a pipe—he smokes hard all the time he dictates his stories, and cannot go on when his pipe goes out till it is refilled. This is what he told me.
“My first novel, though I had written a number of short stories before this, was about the last of the three-deckers. When it was revised and re-written quite recently, for a cheap edition, I understood fully why, in its first form, it was not the brilliant success I, a youth of nineteen, expected it to be. Quite early in my literary career I made the acquaintance, which grew into a warm friendship, of the proprietor of a weekly fiction periodical which had attained an enormous circulation. He was a clever editor, with a keen nose for good stuff; and he would buy nothing else, for he had hit upon the excellent idea that, if you gave the masses good stuff at a low price, they would jump at it. They jumped. I wrote the leading story for this paper for many years, and was well paid. The serials attracted the attention of George Munro, the famous American publisher, who was running a similar paper in New York. He arranged for me to send advance sheets for it, and he afterwards published the serial in cheap book form. They had an enormous—to me a fabulous—sale, and are still selling.
“Munro started a sevenpenny magazine, asking me to edit the English part of it, and to write a serial and a series of short stories. I worked nearly day and night, and was so fully occupied and contented that, absurd as it may sound, I never gave a thought to publishing the serials in book form here in England; notwithstanding that the books were so popular in America that one of George Munro’s rivals hit upon the extremely ingenious idea of waiting until half a novel of mine was published in serial form, getting some one else to finish it, and issuing it in volume form before I had finished the story. Of course, this was before the International Copyright Act. Blessings on its name!
“One day, my friend, that brilliant journalist, Robert Harborough Sherard, while sitting at my writing-desk, took up the American edition of Just a Girl. When I told him it was not published in volume form in England, he asked my permission to take it away and try to place it. He took it to Mr. Coulson Kernahan, who recommended it to the publisher for whom he was reading. It came out, and, to my surprise and delight, proved a success. The review that, more than any other, helped me, was a very kind one in the Queen.[[9]] Then, again, the books were so fortunate as to win the approval of Dr. (now Sir) William Robertson Nicoll; and when he likes a book he does not fail to say so.
[9]. Written by myself.—D. S.
“The rest of my literary career, if the phrase may be permitted me, is public property. I may add that, in my early days, I sold the copyrights of my stories. Later on, I got them back by the simple expedient of buying the periodical, lock, stock and barrel, in which they had appeared; and I am glad to be able to state that I hold now the copyright of everything I have written. Some of the books have been dramatised, and others are on their way to the stage; indeed, at an early age, I made a dramatic essay with a little play in two acts, which was produced at the Royalty Theatre, and obtained a success chiefly, if not entirely, owing to the splendid cast; amongst others, I was fortunate enough to have such actors as Richard Mansfield, who afterwards became so famous in America, that sterling player, Charles Denny, and Fred Everill, of the Haymarket. It would be a poor play such men as these could not pull through. Encouraged by my first effort, I might have directed all my attention to the stage, but fiction had got a firm hold upon me; it was safe and regular—and there you are! But I am making a new start, and ‘you never can tell,’ as Mr. Shaw says.
“The story of my lecturing is soon told. I gave a lecture, consisting of recitals linked together by biographical notes, for a Bideford debating society. An agent who happened to hear it, thought it good enough for the general public, and for some years past I have, during the winter months, appeared on the lecture platform. It is a change of work, which is good; and it is lucrative, which is also good, if not better.
“I have just been elected President of the Institute of Lecturers. The duties of this office will fill in my spare time—when I get it.”
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (“Q”), another admirable writer, not only of novels, but of poems and essays, I have seen hardly at all since he left Oxford, where, sometime after me, he occupied my old panelled set of rooms at Trinity (of which he was a Scholar like myself, and A. E. W. Mason an Exhibitioner some years later), attracted probably by the fact that they had been Cardinal Newman’s rooms when he was an undergraduate. Couch was a splendid example of the mens sana in corpore sano. He was stroke of the College boat, as well as the most brilliant Trinity man of his time intellectually, and he looked it. He had a lithe, active figure, and a humorous, self-reliant face, with light eyes—the type which takes so much beating. For a brief time he had a very successful journalistic career in London, but he quickly decided that it was not worth while to live in London unless you were rich enough to do all the nice things which came along, and returned to his native Cornwall to devote himself to literature. In Cornwall he not only wrote delightful books, but went in for sailing, and became a power in local Liberal politics, and was knighted. Recently he has become Professor of Poetry in the University of Cambridge—a post he was admirably fitted to fill, since the mantle of Francis Turner Palgrave fell upon him as an anthologist. His Oxford Book of Verse is simply delightful.
Couch had from the first been a stylist. When congratulated early in his career on the exquisite writing of a short story, he deprecated its importance, because it was too conscious an imitation of De Maupassant. “My great difficulty is not to imitate my models,” he said. In the light of this saying, it is interesting to recall the fact that in 1897 he was chosen for the high honour of completing Robert Louis Stevenson’s St. Ives, which he did with absolute success. Stevenson must have been one of the models he was trying not to imitate. There is no reason why he should, for no one could want a more delightful style than his own. Hetty Wesley is an exquisite book.