' Such, for example, was the last line of
'The Hunting of the Snark,' which came into my head (as I have already
related in 'The Theatre' for April, 1887) quite suddenly, during a solitary
walk: and such, again, have been passages which occurred in dreams,
and which I cannot trace to any antecedent cause whatever.
There are at least two instances of such dream-suggestions in this book--
one, my Lady's remark, 'it often runs in families, just as a love for
pastry does', at p. 88; the other, Eric Lindon's badinage about having
been in domestic service, at p. 332.
And thus it came to pass that I found myself at last in possession of a
huge unwieldy mass of litterature--if the reader will kindly excuse the
spelling--which only needed stringing together, upon the thread of a
consecutive story, to constitute the book I hoped to write.
Only! The task, at first, seemed absolutely hopeless, and gave me a far
clearer idea, than I ever had before, of the meaning of the word 'chaos':
and I think it must have been ten years, or more, before I had succeeded
in classifying these odds-and-ends sufficiently to see what sort of a
story they indicated: for the story had to grow out of the incidents,
not the incidents out of the story I am telling all this, in no spirit
of egoism, but because I really believe that some of my readers will be
interested in these details of the 'genesis' of a book, which looks so
simple and straight-forward a matter, when completed, that they might
suppose it to have been written straight off, page by page, as one
would write a letter, beginning at the beginning; and ending at the end.
Pages:
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