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peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and
fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a
flat projection. The next thing I knew I had some papers before me
and was writing out a list of chapters. How often have I done so,
and the thing gone no further! But there seemed elements of
success about this enterprise. It was to be a story for boys; no
need of psychology or fine writing; and I had a boy at hand to be a
touchstone. Women were excluded. I was unable to handle a brig
(
which the Hispaniola should have been), but I thought I could make
shift to sail her as a schooner without public shame. And then I
had an idea for John Silver from which I promised myself funds of
entertainment; to take an admired friend of mine (whom the reader
very likely knows and admires as much as I do), to deprive him of
all his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leave
him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, and
his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of
the culture of a raw tarpaulin. Such psychical surgery is, I
think, a common way of 'making character'; perhaps it is, indeed,
the only way. We can put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred
words with us yesterday by the wayside; but do we know him? Our
friend, with his infinite variety and flexibility, we know--but can
we put him in? Upon the first, we must engraft secondary and
imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from the second, knife in
hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless arborescence of his
nature, but the trunk and the few branches that remain we may at
least be fairly sure of.
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