Within the Tides

The tales collected in this book have elicited on their appearance two
utterances in the shape of comment and one distinctly critical charge. A
reviewer observed that I liked to write of men who go to sea or live on
lonely islands untrammeled by the pressure of worldly circumstances
because such characters allowed freer play to my imagination which in
their case was only bounded by natural laws and the universal human
conventions. There is a certain truth in this remark no doubt. It is
only the suggestion of deliberate choice that misses its mark. I have
not sought for special imaginative freedom or a larger play of fancy in
my choice of characters and subjects. The nature of the knowledge,
suggestions or hints used in my imaginative work has depended directly
on the conditions of my active life. It depended more on contacts, and
very slight contacts at that, than on actual experience; because my life
as a matter of fact was far from being adventurous in itself. Even now
when I look back on it with a certain regret (who would not regret his
youth?) and positive affection, its colouring wears the sober hue of
hard work and exacting calls of duty, things which in themselves are not
much charged with a feeling of romance. If these things appeal strongly
to me even in retrospect it is, I suppose, because the romantic feeling
of reality was in me an inborn faculty, that in itself may be a curse
but when disciplined by a sense of personal responsibility and a
recognition of the hard facts of existence shared with the rest of
mankind becomes but a point of view from which the very shadows of life
appear endowed with an internal glow. And such romanticism is not a sin.
It is none the worse for the knowledge of truth. It only tries to make
the best of it, hard as it may be; and in this hardness discovers a
certain aspect of beauty.

I am speaking here of romanticism in relation to life, not of
romanticism in relation to imaginative literature, which, in its early
days, was associated simply with mediæval subjects, or, at any rate,
with subjects sought for in a remote past. My subjects are not mediæval
and I have a natural right to them because my past is very much my own.
If their course lie out of the beaten path of organized social life, it
is, perhaps, because I myself did in a sort break away from it early in
obedience to an impulse which must have been very genuine since it has
sustained me through all the dangers of disillusion. But that origin of
my literary work was very far from giving a larger scope to my
imagination. On the contrary, the mere fact of dealing with matters
outside the general run of everyday experience laid me under the
obligation of a more scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my own