ned,
and the garden was my workshop. There were peaches and figs on the
walls, pleasant shrubs surrounded me, and the place was ideally quiet
and serene. Coffee or tea and toast was served me at 6.30 o'clock A.M.,
my pad was on my knee at 8, and then there was practically uninterrupted
work till 12, when 'dejeuner a la fourchette', with its fresh sardines,
its omelettes, and its roast chicken, was welcome. The afternoon was
spent on the sea-shore, which is very beautiful at Audierne, and there
I watched my friends painting sea-scapes. In the late afternoon came
letter-writing and reading, and after a little and simple dinner at 6.30
came bed at 9.45 or thereabouts. In such conditions for many weeks I
worked on The Trespasser; and I think the book has an outdoor spirit
which such a life would inspire.

It was perhaps natural that, having lived in Canada and Australia, and
having travelled greatly in all the outer portions of the Empire, I
should be interested in and impelled to write regarding the impingement
of the outer life of our far dominions, through individual character,
upon the complicated, traditional, orderly life of England. That feeling
found expression in The Translation of a Savage, and I think that
in neither case the issue of the plot or the plot--if such it may be
called--nor the main incident, was exaggerated. Whether the treatment
was free from exaggeration, it is not my province to say. I only know
what I attempted to do. The sense produced by the contact of the outer
life with a refined, and perhaps overrefined, and sensitive, not to say
meticulous, civilisation, is always more sensational than the touch
of the representative of "the thousand years" with the wide, loosely
organised free life of what is still somewhat hesitatingly called the
Colonies, though the same remark could be applied to all new lands,
such as the United States. The representative of the older life makes
no signs, or makes little collision at any rate, when he touches the new
social organisms of the outer circle. He is not emphatic; he is typical,
but not individual; he seeks seclusion in the mass. It is not so with
the more dynamic personality of the over-sea citizen. For a time
at least he remains in the old civilisation an entity, an isolated,
unabsorbed fact which has capacities for explosion. All this was in my
mind when The Trespasser was written, and its converse was 'The Pomp of
the Lavilettes', which showed the invasio