HOW I LEARNT TO WRITE.

Press, Volume XLV, Issue 6964, 18 January 1888, Page 6

HOW I LEARNT TO WRITE.

BT MB K. L. STEVENSON. - - ■ The New York World publishes ah autobiographical sketch Mr Robert ||Hiiß Stevenson, " furnished expressly to it by special arrangement with the author from a forthcoming, volume, * Memories and Portraits.'" Among other matters Mr Stevenson gives the following account of his early literary attempts :-_- BENT ON LEARNBfQ TO "WfBITE. All through my boyhood and youth (he says), 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 "poind 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 bdlm author (though I wished that too) as that Ijhad vowed that I would leapt to write. 3M_£t was a proficiency that tempted mc; an<f I practised to acquire it, as men whittle, in a wager with myself. Description was the principal field of my exercise : for to any one with senses them 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 Avriting down conversations from memory. And yet this was not the most efficient part of my training. Good thotigh it was, it only taught mc (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 mc no standard of achie-fement. So that there was, perhaps, more profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret labors at home. " PLAYING THE SEDULOUS APE." Whenever I read a book or. a passage that particularly pleased mc, in which a think was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction m the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that, quality.. I was unsuccessful, and 1 knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful, and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practices in rhythm, in harmony, in construction, and the .coordination 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, arid to Obermanh. 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, who had cast on mc 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 1) 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 alliance 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. IMITATION AND ORIGINALITY. That (adds Mr Stevenson), 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, and there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats'. It was so, if We could trace it out, that all men have learned; and tbat is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heraldedbya cast back to earlier and fresher models. Perhaps I hear some one 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, neither could any be more unlike Cicero; yet no'craftsman can fail to see how much tbe one must have tried in his time to imitate the other. Burns is the very type of a prime force in letters; he was of all men the most imitative. 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 very true saying that failure is the only high road to success. 1 must have had some disSosition to learn; for I clear-sightedly conemned my own performance's. 1 liked doing them indeed; but when they were done, I could see they were rubbish. Thrice I put myself in the way of an 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 other amateurs) I suspected was the cose, 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 favor of the public. " THE SPEC." AND THE " UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE." The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has counted among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Homer, Benjamin Constant, Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local celebrity besides. By an accident, variously explained, it has its rooms in the very buildings of the University of Edinburgh. I sat one December morning in the library of the Speculative; a very humble-minded youth, though it was a virtue I had never hod much credit for; yet proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec.; proud of the pipe I was smoking in the teeth of the Senatus; and in particular, proud of being in the next room to three very distinguished students, who were then conversing beside the corridor fire. When they had called mc in to them, and made mc a sharer in their design, I too became drunken with pride and hope. We were to fonnd a University magazine. A pair of little active brothers —Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book shop over against the University building—had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjunct editors, and, what was the main point of the concern, to print" our own works; while, by every rule of arithmetic that flatterer of credulity—the adventure must succeed and bring.great profit. Weil, well, it was a bright vision. 1 went home that morning walking upon air. To have been chosen by these three distinguished students was to mc the most unspeakable advance; it was my first draught of consideration; it reconciled mc to myself and to my fellow-men; and as I steered round the railings at the Tron, I could not withhold my lips from smiling publicly. Yet, in the bottom of my heart, I knew that magazine would be a grim fiasco; I knew it would not be worth reading; I knew, even if it were, that nobody would read it; and I kept wondering how I should be able, upon my compact income of £12 per annum, payable monthly, to meet my share in the expense. It was a comfortable thought to mc tbat I had a father. The magazine appeared in a yellow cover, which was the best part of it, for at least it was unassuming; it ran four months in undisturbed obscurity, and died without a gasp. The first number was edited by all four of us with prodigious bustle; the second fell principally into the hands of Ferrier and mc; the third I edited alone; and it has long been a solemn question who it was that edited the fourth. It would perhaps, be still more difficult to say who read it. I had sent a copy to the lady with whom my heart was at that time somewhat engaged, and who did all that in her lay to break it; and she, with some tact, passed over the gift and my cherished contributions in silence. 1 will not say that I was pleased at this ; but I will ; tell her now, if by any chance she

takes up the work of her former servant'! that I thought the better of her taste. 1 cleared the decks after this last engagement ; had the necessary interview with my father, which passed off not amiss; paid over my share the expenses to the two little active brothers, who rubbed their hands as much,* but methought skipped rather less than formerly, having perhaps, these two also, embarked upon the enterprise with some graceful illusions; and then, reviewing the whole episode, I told myself that the time was not yet ripe nor the man ready; and to work I went again with my penny version books, having fallen back in one day from the printed author to the manuscript 6tudent. A GIFT WITHOUT A PARALLEL. The PeSter Lloyd recently announced that Baron Hirsch has given 100,000,000f to be distributed among the Jewish communities of Europe and the Jewish charities, in proportions corresponding to their necessities. The news was contradicted, and in this form it was inaccurate. These are the facts : — " About three months ago," says the Paris correspondent of The Times, " some days before the departure for Copenhagen of the Emperor of Russia, Baron-Hirsch sent a letter to the Czar, in which he offered the sum of £2,000,000 to found in Russia primary schools for the Jews, and £40,000 to be at the disposal of the Czar for works of charity. The Czar wrote a note on the letter, and requested the Russian Minister of the Interior to report verbally upon it on his return to Russia. The offer thus remained a dead letter for three months. During this time those who knew of it asked if Baron Hirsch, justly offended by this delay, would not withdraw his promise, and if such a delay did not expose this great and generous idea to the risk of not being realised. Happily these fears are at end. On the return of the Tzar he heard the verbal report of his Minister of the Interior, and signed the acceptance of the jdft. The £..,000,000 have been or are to be paid into the Bank of England, and Baron Rothschild and Baron de Worms, who are appointed trustees, and who will be replaced in case of death, will receive the interest of the sum so deposited. It is estimated that with the annual interest of about £100,000 it will be possible to open 1000 schools, receiving.so,ooo children, w ho will thus be rescued from ignorance and a bad example. Never has such a munificent; gift been made by a rich man in his lifetime to the destitute. AFTER GOLD IN SOUTH AFRICA. Pastor Brincker, a missionary, writes from Otyiinbingue to Berlin that dye gold diggers had arrived there from Australia in August in search of gold. Two were sons of an Englishman who, thirty-three yearsago,foundgold attheold copper mines at Obyimbingue. They had been saving money for a long time in order to prosecute the search further, and they soon found the scene of the former discovery. The missionary sfays the diggers are astonished at the richness of the vein.

" The lumps of gold," he says, " may be seen with the naked eye. Dr. Goring, the Imperial Commissioner, believes that mil lions of marks' worth are lying at this one place. The spot is below Ahnawood, eight hours' hence, in a sort of island in the bed of tho Tsoakoub. There is more water than is desired, for the diggers scent alluvial gold in the bed of the stream. According to the evidence of these experienced meu the place is richer than any in Australia. And now the gold hunt is going to begin." In the view of this gentleman it will only be possible to work the veins by means of dynamite and stampingmachines, so that companies will be required having at command considerable capital. The Elberfeld Mission reports that gold has also been found in four places between thirty and forty English miles below Otyim bin true.