I
All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for the
pattern of an idler;[1] and yet I was always busy on my own private
end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my
pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy
fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside,
I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in
my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some
halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was
for no ulterior use, it was written consciously for practice. It was
not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished that too)
as that I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a
proficiency that tempted me; and I practised to acquire it, as men
learn to whittle, in a wager with myself. Description was the
principal field of my exercise; for to any one with senses there is
always something worth describing, and town and country are but one
continuous subject. But I worked in other ways also; often accompanied
my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played many parts; and
often exercised myself in writing down conversations from memory.
This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes
tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a
school of posturing[2] and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was
not the most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it
only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the lower and
less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential
note and the right word: things that to a happier constitution had
perhaps come by nature. And regarded as training, it had one grave
defect; for it set me no standard of achievement. So that there was
perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret
labours at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly
pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with
propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some
happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself
to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried
again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at
least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony,
in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the
sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne,
to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to
Obermann.[3] I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called
_The Vanity of Morals_: it was to have had a second part, _The Vanity
of Knowledge_; and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, the
names were apt; but the second part was never attempted, and the first
part was written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghostlike, from
its ashes) no less than three times: first in the manner of Hazlitt,
second in the manner of Ruskin,[4] who had cast on me a passing spell,
and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne. So with my
other works: _Cain_, an epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation of
_Sordello: Robin Hood_, a tale in verse, took an eclectic middle
course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer and Morris: in _Monmouth,_ a
tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my innumerable
gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many masters; in the first draft of
_The King's Pardon_, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no lesser man
than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with
staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, and
of course conceived my fable in a less serious vein--for it was not
Congreve's verse, it was his exquisite prose, that I admired and
sought to copy. Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice
to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles[5] in the style of
the _Book of Snobs_. So I might go on for ever, through all my
abortive novels, and down to my later plays,[6] of which I think more
tenderly, for they were not only conceived at first under the bracing
influence of old Dumas, but have met with, resurrections: one,
strangely bettered by another hand, came on the stage itself and was
played by bodily actors; the other, originally known as _Semiramis: a
Tragedy_, I have observed on bookstalls under the _alias_ of _Prince
Otto_. But enough has been said to show by what arts of impersonation,
and in what purely ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on
paper.
That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have
profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned,[7] and
there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats's; it
was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that
is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a
cast back to earlier and fresher models. Perhaps I hear someone cry
out: But this is not the way to be original! It is not; nor is there
any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there
anything in this training that shall clip the wings of your
originality. There can be none more original than Montaigne,[8]
neither could any be more unlike Cicero; yet no craftsman can fail to
see how much the one must have tried in his time to imitate the other.
Burns[9] is the very type of a prime force in letters: he was of all
men the most imitative. Shakespeare himself, the imperial, proceeds
directly from a school. It is only from a school that we can expect to
have good writers; it is almost invariably from a school that great
writers, these lawless exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything here
that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what cadences
he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible;
before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should
long have practised the literary scales;[10] and it is only after
years of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words
swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding
for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and (within
the narrow limit of a man's ability) able to do it.
And it is the great point of these imitations that there still shines
beyond the student's reach his inimitable model. Let him try as he
please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very old and a very
true saying that failure is the only highroad to success. I must have
had some disposition to learn; for I clear-sightedly condemned my own
performances. I liked doing them indeed; but when they were done, I
could see they were rubbish. In consequence, I very rarely showed them
even to my friends; and such friends as I chose to be my confidants I
must have chosen well, for they had the friendliness to be quite plain
with me. "Padding," said one. Another wrote: "I cannot understand why
you do lyrics so badly." No more could I! Thrice I put myself in the
way of a more authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine.
These were returned; and I was not surprised nor even pained. If they
had not been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the
case, there was no good in repeating the experiment; if they had been
looked at--well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must keep
on learning and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune which is
the occasion of this paper, and by which I was able to see my
literature in print, and to measure experimentally how far I stood
from the favour of the public.