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, unabsorbed fact which has capacities for explosion. All this was in my mind when The Trespasser was written, and its converse was ‘The Pomp of the Lavilettes’, which showed the invasion of the life of the outer land by the representative of the old civilisation. I do not know whether I had the thought that the treatment of such themes was interesting or not. The idea of The Trespasser was there in my mind, and I had to use it. At the beginning of one’s career, if one were to calculate too carefully, impulse, momentum, daring, original conception would be lost. To be too audacious, even to exaggerate, is no crime in youth nor in the young artist. As a farmer once said to me regarding a frisky mount, it is better to smash through the top bar than to have spring-halt. The Trespasser took its place, and, as I think, its natural place, in the development of my literary life. I did not stop to think whether it was a happy theme or not, or whether it had popular elements. These things did not concern me. When it was written I should not have known what was a popular theme. It was written under circumstances conducive to its artistic welfare; if it has not as many friends as ‘The Right of Way’ or ‘The Seats of the Mighty’ or ‘The Weavers’ or ‘The Judgment House’, that is not the fault of the public or of the critics. TO DOUGLAS ROBINSON, Esq., AND FRANK A. HILTON, Esq. My dear Douglas and Frank: