Ranging beyond this volume, I cannot recollect writing the first words of “The Island Pharisees”—­but it would be about August, 1901.  Like all the stories in “Villa Rubein,” and, indeed, most of my tales, the book originated in the curiosity, philosophic reflections, and unphilosophic emotions roused in me by some single figure in real life.  In this case it was Ferrand, whose real name, of course, was not Ferrand, and who died in some “sacred institution” many years ago of a consumption brought on by the conditions of his wandering life.  If not “a beloved,” he was a true vagabond, and I first met him in the Champs Elysees, just as in “The Pigeon” he describes his meeting with Wellwyn.  Though drawn very much from life, he did not in the end turn out very like the Ferrand of real life—­the, figures of fiction soon diverge from their prototypes.

The first draft of “The Island Pharisees” was buried in a drawer; when retrieved the other day, after nineteen years, it disclosed a picaresque string of anecdotes told by Ferrand in the first person.  These two-thirds of a book were laid to rest by Edward Garnett’s dictum that its author was not sufficiently within Ferrand’s skin; and, struggling heavily with laziness and pride, he started afresh in the skin of Shelton.  Three times be wrote that novel, and then it was long in finding the eye of Sydney Pawling, who accepted it for Heinemann’s in 1904.  That was a period of ferment and transition with me, a kind of long awakening to the home truths of social existence and national character.  The liquor bubbled too furiously for clear bottling.  And the book, after all, became but an introduction to all those following novels which depict—­somewhat satirically—­the various sections of English “Society” with a more or less capital “S.”

Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one’s work, it is interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the mellowness of full achievement.  One can even tell the nature of one’s readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this side than of that.  My early work was certainly more emotional than critical.  But from 1901 came nine years when the critical was, in the main, holding sway.  From 1910 to 1918 the emotional again struggled for the upper hand; and from that time on there seems to have been something of a “dead beat.”  So the conflict goes, by what mysterious tides promoted, I know not.

An author must ever wish to discover a hapless member of the Public who, never yet having read a word of his writing, would submit to the ordeal of reading him right through from beginning to end.  Probably the effect could only be judged through an autopsy, but in the remote case of survival, it would interest one so profoundly to see the differences, if any, produced in that reader’s character or outlook over life.  This, however, is a consummation which will remain devoutly to be wished, for there is a limit to human complaisance.  One will never know the exact measure of one’s infecting power; or whether, indeed, one is not just a long soporific.