A College Magazine - Page 2

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