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,