A College Magazine

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