THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES i Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/autobiographyofsOObesa AUTOBIOGRAPHY of SIR WALTER BESANT WITH A PREFATORY NOTE BY S. SQUIRE SPRIGGE NEW YORK- DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY • MDCCCCII COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY DODD, MEAD AND CO. First Edition Published April, 1902 UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. Contents CHAPTER I Child and Boy i CHAPTER II Child and Boy {continued) 33 CHAPTER III School-Boy 55 CHAPTER IV King's College, London 67 CHAPTER V Christ's College, Cambridge 79 CHAPTER VI A Tramp Abroad 102 CHAPTER VII L'Ile de France m CHAPTER VIII England again : The Palestine Exploration Fund i45 V 891981 CONTENTS CHAPTER IX PAGE First Steps in the Literary Career — and Later i68 CHAPTER X The Start in Fiction : Critics and Criti- casters 1 80 CHAPTER XI The Novelist with a Free Hand .... 198 CHAPTER XII The Society of Authors and Other Societies 215 CHAPTER XIII Philanthropic Work 243 CHAPTER XIV The Survey of London « 261 CHAPTER XV The Atlantic Union 265 CHAPTER XVI Conclusion : The Conduct of Life and the Influence of Religion 273 INDEX 287 VI — A Prefatory Note . " It is hard to speak of him within measure when we consider his devotion to the cause of authors, and the constant good service ren- dered hy him to their material interests. In this he was a valorous, alert, persistent advocate, and it will not be denied by his opponents that he was always urbane, his object being simply to establish a sys- tem of fair dealing between the sagacious publishers of books and the inexperienced, often heedless, producers. How unselfishly, with how pure a generosity he gave his valuable time to the previously neglected ofRce of adviser to the more youthful of his profession, may be esti- mated by a review of his memorable labours in other fields. They were vast and toilsome, yet he never missed an occasion for acting as the young author's voluntary friend In the least sentimental and most sensible manner. He had no thought of trouble or personal loss ." where the welfare of his fellow-workers was concerned. Mr. George Meredith, writing of Sir Walter Besant in the Author of July, 1901. /4 N autobiography should be its own justifica- /-\ tion and its own interpretation. There -^ should be no room for a preface and no need for any intermediary between the writer and the pubHc to whom he has designed to appeal. If it is necessary to add much to an autobiography, the author is made to appear to have suppressed things that he should have said ; if any passages are deleted, the portrait of himself which he proposed to draw is rendered incomplete. I have kept these things before me, and in preparing Sir Walter Besant's autobiography for the press have confined vii A P REFA T O RT NOTE the modifications to the correction of obvious slips, and to the addition of certain passages — mainly quo- tations from his own works ^ — to which references were made in the manuscript. Only a few words are called for, but the circumstances in which Sir Walter Besant's autobiography is being published require a little explanation. These circumstances account for the slight corrections that have been made, as well as for the. obvious incompleteness of his record in certain directions. It has been felt by his widow, by the executors of his will, and by his literary executor, that this, in justice to his memory, should be made clear to the reader. Sir Walter Besant's autobiography was written for publication, and no one had any right to with- hold the book from the public. Yet although Sir Walter Besant expressly meant his account of his life to be published, death overtook him before he had prepared it for press. Those who were familiar with the man and his literary methods know well what that means ; they know that the autobiography is not presented in the form it would have appeared in had it undergone the minute revision to which all his written matter was subjected. His limpid style did not betray the fact that he was a rigorous critic of himself. In the eleventh chapter of the autobiography he explains to all whom it may in- terest his manner of writing a book. He compares 1 Messrs. Chatto & Windus, the publishers of Sir Walter Besant's novels, have kindly given permission for the inclusion of these passages in the autobiography. viii A P RE FA T O RT NOTE it to the task of an engineer constructing a tunnel, drilling and mining, completing the work behind while thrusting the pick into the work ahead. This autobiography is to some extent an unfinished tunnel. Being an autobiography, the course of the work was clearly indicated to the author, who was able to dispense with a rough draft. But what he should include and what he should omit, what he should treat fully and what he should regard as episodes, had to be considered, and this was cer- tainly not done by Besant in all places with his usual thorough care. If he had followed his invariable plan of composition, he would have made up his mind on many such points only when he came to the actual task of revising. This revision was wont to be done upon his manuscript roughly, and then very fully upon a type-written copy of that manu- script. The manuscript of the autobiography had not been type-written. The written manuscript was fully and freely corrected, and it may be taken for granted that the earlier portions of the work now appear much as they were intended to appear; but the later chapters would certainly have been amplified, and possibly modified in some directions. Such revision cannot be done now by any one, how- ever sure we may feel that it would have been done by him. If certain passages appear to readers to be unnecessarily sweeping, and especially if those who enjoyed a personal acquaintance with Besant find expressions of opinion in his posthumous me- moir which hardly represent the man they knew, I ; A PREFATORY NOTE would press that these points may be remembered: that he died leaving the manuscript in what he would have considered an unfinished state ; that it was his express desire that it should be published and that any attempt to modify his work either by addition or subtraction, however honest in its inten- tion to make a more accurate picture, would amount to a dangerous tampering with the original. The autobiography does Besant scant justice, but, in noting the deficiencies, I do so with no com- pletely unnecessary eulogy, and no equally unneces- sary apology. Nor do I attempt to point out places where I believe the author would have made altera- tions. The revision might have taken the fiDrm of some modification of words, or the addition of other matter which would have altered the proportions of the work, and no one can guess which change, if any, would have been made. But it is permissible to say a few prefatory words to guard against false impressions, the creation of which would certainly not have been risked had Besant revised his manu- script as a whole. Firstly, then, although Sir Walter Besant with much directness, and several times, inveighs against the evangelical tenets which prevailed in his youth, and although he enunciates at the end of his auto- biography his religious creed with complete clear- ness, there is no real connection between his creed and his dislike of evangelical teaching. From a religious point of view his dislike was rather to ritualism. His hatred — for no other word can be A P RE FA T RT NOTE used — of the evangelical teaching of his youth was an expression of his delight in life, and had nothing to do with his sacred convictions. He saw the beauty of holiness, but he loathed the doctrine that it was wrong to be happy in this world — the idea that heaven was propitiated by the earthly misery of those who sought to be good. He perceived the stupidinconsistency and illogicality of those who held that the small section who did as they did would be saved whatever their failings, while all who differed from them about such a minor ethical point as, say, the propriety of play-going, must be irretrievably damned, whatever their virtues. " If a person," says Overton in 'The English Church of the Nineteenth Century with regard to the evangelical school, " was enjoying awell-spread feast at Clapham, with all the charms of the conversation of Wilberforce or Milner — which to many people would be in- finitely more entertaining than most of the so-called entertainments provided by 'the world' — he was doing right, and was, so far as outward surroundings went, on the way to heaven. But if he was reading one of Miss Austen's novels, or at a dance, or a concert, or at a card-table (not necessarily gambling), or seeing one of Goldsmith's delightful plays acted, he was doing wrong, and, so far as outward sur- roundings, was in plain words on the way to hell." Besant was born and bred in touch with these views, and imbibed a horror of their cruelty. And if an intense dislike of seeing people wan- tonly made unhappy set him against the tenets of ; A PREFATORY NOTE the party in the English Church with which he should have had most affinity, so an equally intense dislike of the mystical set him against ritualism.