HOW HE BEGAN

Evening Post, Volume LXXXV, Issue 57, 8 March 1913, Page 13

HOW HE BEGAN

MR. FREDERIC HARRISON'S FIRST ESSAYS WITH THE PEN. In reply to a request from Mr. T. P. O'Connor, to tell the world "how he began," Mr. Frederic Harrison, the doyen of the Positivists, wrote (in T.P.s Weekly) :*— "How can you ask me to tell your readers how I became an author ? I never did become an author. I have never presumed to claim myself a full member of your noble guild. I am an interloper, an amateur — I fear, a blackleg—in your honourable company. I just sneaked into literary work unawares, by a back door, by accident. I must have been well on to 30 at least before I ever saw a line of mine in print. 'How did I learn to write at all? you ask, for I admit that I have been an arrant scribbler of late years, and have two books .now On the stocks. Well! I learned to write t just by writing, as fishes learn to swim by swimming, and birds learn to sing by singing. Only, I did not pour out my effusions oh the public, but on my friends! That is to say, by writing them letters by the post ever since I could hold a good pen, pointing straight to the shoulder-blade, and thus became the only living caligraphistpisn't this 'copy' itself a record of beautiful penmanship in a man entering his 82nd year ?-~eVer since the year 1841. Whenever I saw a clean sheet of paper, a new pen, and a full inkstand —none of your fountain abominations for me-^I began to scribble away automatically. Never mind sense, nor object, nor ever grammar. Write — write— write— as Hood s sntrtmaker went stitch —stitch— stitch. It's a sort of tarantella. I must write as a dancing dervish must dance. But I did not want to get it printed. I packed it off by post to a parent, a relation, a friendsometimes to an enemy— and did not care a fig whether my correspondent liked it or not."