Ch. 4 - A College Magazine

I

ALL through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for
the pattern of an idler; 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 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.
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