[Illustration: drawing by Geo. Hutchinson
_'PHYSIOLOGICAL ÆSTHETICS' AND 'PHILISTIA'_
The story of my first book is a good deal mixed, and, like many other stories, cannot be fully understood without some previous allusion to what historians call 'the causes which led to it.' For my first book was not my first novel, and it is the latter, I take it, not the former, that an expectant world, as represented by the readers of this volume, is anxious to hear about. I first blossomed into print with 'Physiological Æsthetics' in 1877--the title alone will be enough for most people--and it was not till seven years later that I wrote and published my earliest long work of fiction, which I called 'Philistia.' I wasn't born a novelist, I was only made one. Philosophy and science were the first loves of my youth. I dropped into romance as many men drop into drink, or opium-eating, or other bad practices, not of native perversity, but by pure force of circumstances. And this is how fate (or an enterprising publisher) turned me from an innocent and impecunious naturalist into a devotee of the muse of shilling shockers.
When I left Oxford in 1870, with a decent degree and nothing much else in particular to brag about, I took perforce to that refuge of the destitute, the trade of schoolmaster. To teach Latin and Greek verse at Brighton College, Cheltenham College, Reading Grammar School, successively, was the extremely uncongenial task imposed upon me by the chances of the universe. But in 1873, Providence, disguised as the Colonial Office, sent me out in charge of a new Government College at Spanish Town, Jamaica. I had always been psychological, and in the space and leisure of the lazy Tropics I began to excogitate by slow degrees various expansive works on the science of mind, the greater number of which still remain unwritten. Returning to England in '76 I found myself out of work, and so committed to paper some of my views on the origin of the higher pleasure we derive from natural or artistic products; and I called my book 'Physiological Æsthetics.' It was not my very first attempt at literature; already I had produced about a hundred or more magazine articles on various philosophical and scientific subjects, every one of which I sent to the editors of leading reviews, and every one of which was punctually 'Declined with thanks,' or committed without even that polite formality to the editorial waste paper basket. Nothing daunted by failure, however, I wrote on and on, and made up my mind, in my interval of forced idleness, to print a book of my own at all hazards.