My Life as an Author

by Martin Farquhar Tupper

What Mr. Butler says in his preface, no doubt after speech with me, for I was his visitor at the time in 1851, is this:—

"All who have had the good fortune to meet Mr. Tupper during his visit here have been struck with his characteristic impulsiveness. In accordance with this feature of his mind, nearly all of his most successful performances have been occasioned by something altogether incidental and unpremeditated—the result of an impulse accidentally—shall we not say, providentially?—imparted. It was so with the first work in this series (four volumes) respecting the composition of which he has given to me in conversation the following account. Some years ago he purchased a house at Brighton. While laying out the garden, he had occasion to have several drains made. One day observing a workman, Francis Suter, standing in one of the trenches wet and wearied with toil, Mr. Tupper said to him in a tone of pleasantry, 'Wouldn't you like to dig up there a crock full of gold?'—'If I did,' said the man, 'it would do me no good, because merely finding it would not make it mine.'—'But suppose you could not only find such a treasure, but might honestly keep it, wouldn't you think yourself lucky?'—'Oh yes, sir, I suppose I should—but,' after a pause, 'but I am not so sure, sir, that it is the best thing that could happen to me. I think, on the whole, I would rather have steady work and fair wages all the season than find a crock of gold.'

"Here was wisdom. The remark of the honest trench-digger at once set in motion a train of thought in the mind of the author. He entered his study, wrote in large letters on a sheet of paper these words, 'The Crock of Gold, a Tale of Covetousness,' and in less than a week that remarkable story was written. By the advice of his wife, however, he spent another week in rewriting it, and then gave it to the world in its finished state."

In the same Butlerian volume occurs the following MS. notice written by me (in about 1853) respecting the origins of my two other tales, the three being issued together:—

"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 models; but no good one servilely will betray the forms they rather get hints from than actually copy. Thus though I sketched Roger Acton from one Robert Tunnel, an Albury labourer, and took the cottage near Postford Pond as his home,—adding 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 I had seen,—I need not say that my sketches from nature were but outlines to my finished work of art. Simon Jennings, however, is an exact portrait of a man I knew at Brighton. So also with these tales, and others of my writings."

About "The Twins" a curious and somewhat awkward 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 somewhat dangerous to invent blindly. However, my total innocence of any intentional allusion to private matters whereof I was entirely ignorant 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 of my tale's publication had no existence,—the very name having been taken some years after. This is another instance of the literary perils to which imaginative authors may be subject; for litera scripta manet, especially if in printer's ink, and, for aught I know, that offhand word might 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 Commandments, these three being an instalment; and I mentally sketched my fourth upon Idolatry, "The Prior of Marrick," but nothing came of it. The Decalogue hangs together 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 a manuscript note perhaps worth printing here:

"If I had been gifted with the true prophetic power, hereabouts should my heartless hero have stumbled on a big nugget of gold (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 may be. However, I did not originally make the splendid guess, and will not now in a future edition surreptitiously interpolate such a suggestive incident, after the example of dishonest Murphy in his prognostic of that coldest January 7th. It may be true enough that, for my story's sake, I may wish I had thought of such a not unlikely find: for the uselessness of the mere metal to a positively starving man in the desert might have furnished comment analogous to what was uttered by Timon of Athens; and would have been picturesque enough 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 mind and an originality 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 deformity and inconceivable meanness, and through 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 time."