1869.
He who possesses talent should also possess courage. He must dare trust
his inspiration, he must be convinced that the fancy which flashes
through his brain is a healthy one, that the form which comes natural
to him, even if it be a new one, has a right to assert its claims; he
must have gained the hardihood to expose himself to the charge of being
affected, or on the wrong path, before he can yield to his instinct
and follow it wherever it may imperiously lead. When Armand Carrel, a
young journalist at the time, was censured by the editor of the paper
for which he wrote, who, pointing to a passage in the young man's
article, remarked, "That is not the way people write," he replied, "I
do not write as people write, but as I myself write," and this is the
universal formula of a gifted nature. It countenances neither fugitive
rubbish, nor arbitrary invention, but with entire self-consciousness
it expresses the right of talent, when neither traditional form nor
existing material suffices to meet the peculiar requirements of its
nature, to choose new material, to create new forms, until it finds a
soil of a quality to give nurture to all of its forces and gently and
freely develop them. Such a soil the poet Hans Christian Andersen found
in the nursery story.